The actual reality of this “secret information” is usually a fairly different story altogether, with 95% of it being pretty banal and ordinary – and that’s when the stuff that makes its way to the public space isn’t completely fabricated to begin with.

But hacks with delusions of being Bruno Gianelli will continue being so, and this sort of nonsense won’t disappear any time soon.

So lets kick the door down on the secrecy and see how a modern campaign actually runs – the research involved, the technology, the analysis, the logistics of the ground game and the capabilities that get brought to the table when all of these things become integrated. Let’s look at the anatomy of a modern campaign  – not just any campaign, but one of the more sophisticated campaigns ever run and one that is happening in Queensland right now.

Some of the details involved here will surprise a lot of people, scare the bejesus out of others and demonstrate that there’s a lot of  pontificating has-beens around the joint whose understanding of modern politics is pretty redundant and irrelevant.

First – a brief partisan backgrounder (feel free to skip it if your conservative sensibilities are feeling particularly delicate at the moment). When the Newman Government came to power in Queensland – off the back of making a set of campaign promises to the Qld public sector and wider Qld public on public services – they quickly set about breaking them. They sacked 14,000 public servants when they promised otherwise (costing themselves around $300 million more than they needed to, while ending up with a larger public service than they would have had if they simply sat around with their thumb up their rectum and did nothing). They’ve started attacking the delivery of a wide range of public services based on similar levels of competence demonstrated with their public sector “reform”, and have generally acted like a bunch of arrogant fools defined by their gross ignorance and public policy ineptness.

Enter stage far-right Peter Costello. The Newman Government, with delusions of grandeur stemming from their enormous victory, hired Costello to produce an alleged audit report that would provide a blue-print for the government’s policy direction over the next term (or five terms if you listened to some of the hubris coming out of them). Costello’s report basically recommends privatising everything the Qld government owns and outsourcing everything it doesn’t where possible – a sort of ideological wet dream that makes Kennett’s Victoria appear as a bastion of socialist endeavour..

Unfortunately for the government, the people of Qld have other ideas about that.

So Newman has promised that there will be no privatisation without a mandate from the Qld people at the next election (an election at some unspecified time) in an effort to curtail the backlash. While the summary report was released a while ago, the full report is due to be unveiled publically some time during the next few weeks.

Which brings us to today.  A government with little public policy experience and a (albeit brief) history of general incompetence in the area, about to receive the centrepiece of its first term policy agenda that recommends undertaking the largest privatisation and outsourcing program in Australian history, but one that can only be fully achieved with a fresh mandate from the Qld people via a new election.

Then there’s us (my employer) – Qld’s public sector union – and our campaign.

From the very beginning – and this is going back to well before the last Qld election – we discussed what may or may not happen with the next government and the resources and capabilities we may or may not need. A fair bit of what you could describe as casual wargaming was had, and various capabilities were built up or continued to be built up that could be utilised or redeployed as necessary – particularly on the non-industrial side (the community campaigning and advocacy side). We also started to devise a fairly significant research program.

So we came into this with existing capabilities and knowledge – which is a fundamentally important, but often unappreciated component of any campaigning apparatus.

Let’s jump ahead to the beginning of this year. We knew what Newman was doing, we knew what he was preparing, we also knew that powerful parts of the LNP were starting to push the idea of an early election – so we flicked the switch to “on”.

You cannot manage what you do not know

It’s not 2001 anymore. It’s not 1992. It’s certainly not 1985

You simply cannot manage what you do not know.

We knew from existing research that the Qld public was opposed – vehemently opposed – to the privatisation and outsourcing of public services. More so than any other state.

But was that opposition homogenous? If not, where was it strongest and weakest by geography, by demographic cohort, by political cohort – and what were the spreads involved?

What was the strength of that opposition? How much was passive and how much was active opposition -  as in how much was it a generically passive “Nah – I don’t like it” type thing compared to how much was  more akin to “I’m storming the fucking barricades if you try that one on mate!” type opposition?

What was the relationship between privatisation and voting intention? How much was one going to drive the other? How much did it now? How much could it? What were the sensitivity thresholds involved? What was the distribution of the dynamics of those issue/voting intention relationships across the major demographic, social, cultural and electoral cohorts?

We found out.

To do so took the largest single polling and research program in Australian history.

Dual use Robocalling

After the summary of the Costello report was released and the media had spread around the message of its contents for a week, we launched the first phase of a two phase research program, but one that could be harnessed for a second use – canvassing and campaign recruitment. The timing was also important, as the government was just about to start considering the contents of the report. We wanted the electorates to give some pretty solid feedback immediately before their local LNP members went into the consideration phase. Suffice to say that was successful.

We knew Megapoll was coming (more on that later) which would provide a massive amount of statistically accurate data on opinion, yet we also knew the statistics involved with ringing random Qld households i.e. if you ring 10,000 random households and someone picks up the phone, we know what percent will be men, what percent will be women and what percent of each of those will have what ages as a series of probability distributions.

So we bombarded strategic electorates (at first) with robocalls using ReachTEL (The Peoples Pollster) that were unweighted. We didn’t need the results to contain any demographic information that enables it to be weighted as all orthodox polls are,  as we could deal with that at the end with some clever maths, to derive real world estimates that were within acceptable error parameters for us with this part of the research program (which saved money, increased completion rates and delivered more calls).

The dual-use robocalling was a simple message and question combination that went (with slight rewording each day to account for what day the calls were made on):

This is a message from Together. On Monday, the Queensland state government is considering a report which recommends the privatisation of public services including health and hospitals, disability services, child protection, corrective services and schools. It means these public services could be handed to large corporations to run

Do you support or oppose the privatisation of these public services?

People heard the message, which was important in and of itself, but for those that answered “Oppose”, a follow up question was asked:

Would you be willing to be contacted to join a community campaign to stop the privatisation of these public services?

The people that answered “YES” to this then had their numbers recorded. We are one of the few unions with our own dedicated outbound call centre, so we then used our call centre to contact these new recruits and bring them into the community campaign we were planning.

It turned out to be so successful that we continued to run it for the next week across every LNP held electorate in Qld, hitting over 130,000 people with the full message, getting over 50,000 household responses and garnering over 10,000 contacts of which about 75% were in places and electorates that were “campaign viable”.

On the research side, we then broke those results down by electorate and used a big regression/simulation analysis (combined with Megapoll and recruit data) to find the passive/active spread of opposition to generic privatisation for each electorate.

From this, we not only added thousands and thousands of new recruits to our community campaign from demographic cohorts and occupational backgrounds and electorates that generally never join anything, but we also know the passive/active split of opposition in each electorate – so we know what proportion of people are passively opposed (those that simply don’t like it) compared to those that are actively opposed (those that don’t like it and are willing to participate in activities in order to do something about it) in every LNP held seat in Qld. This is one of the few pieces of data (one of only three in fact) from our mountains of data that we will keep secret – such is its high value. Suffice to say that some electorates have active opposition rates well over 20% of the population – which is just extraordinary in historical terms. That means over 1 in 5 people in those electorate are so pissed off with the idea of privatising public services that they are willing to actively participate in stopping it. We also know that it never drops below 7% in any electorate, including those on the Gold Coast which are notorious for not giving a shit about politics.

Megapoll

Phase two of the research program was undertaking the largest proper political poll in Australian history with a sample of over 36,000. We polled Qld at the electorate level, for every electorate, with a series of questions and demographic information. You can read all about the Megapoll results here – it’s the state level results with links to the micro-regional breakdowns (groups of seats between 3 and 8 in number). I’ve also got it in a condensed version here. The seat level data as a whole is the second piece of data we’ll keep to ourselves, though we’re releasing a lot of it to various local media outlets so they can get a handle on the views of their local communities. The demographic cross-tabs contains extraordinarily valuable information not only for the campaign, but our broader analysis and continuing research.

You cannot manage what you do not know?

We now “know”.

Between the Dual-Use Robocalling program, Megapoll and our other research, we can now answer every single one of the questions under the “You cannot manage what you do not know” heading above. Every. Single. One.

Before we get onto some juicy bits about how this works in practice, it’s worth noting about now that among the lesser political commentariat – the types of dismal people that make a partial living providing the elevator music of political commentary – we were accused of push polling.

This accusation mostly comes from various drones that couldn’t comprehend why one might need such a large poll, or folks thought Megapoll was actually the dual use robocalling, but were too dim to understand either program, or too lazy to even bother asking someone to find out (we’re hard to find apparently!) before pontificating on matters they know not an ounce of shit about.

Well, except for Lawrence Springborg who has made the allegation on a number of occasions, but he appears to be perpetually confused, so we’d really expect no less from him.

Push polling, by the way, is a bit of a myth in Australia (as it is in most parts of the world) – and it doesn’t mean what most people think it does. What happened to John McCain in South Carolina is push polling  . Seeing a poll you don’t like the wording of, or don’t understand the purpose of, isn’t.

Meanwhile, this isn’t the only data we have. One of things that all Federal members have access to (which basically means every semi-advanced level political hack in the country has access to as well) – is a statistical estimate of the breakdown of the most recent election not just by booths, but booth catchments (areas around a booth that catch where people that vote in each booth live), which are then broken down further into census level blocks at the Census Collection District level (and now moving to what’s called the SA1 level that replaced them in the 2011 Census). It’s provided by the Parliamentary Library via work produced by the AEC, that they undertake primarily for reasons of electoral redistribution processes and analysis. Basically it anchors the booths people vote at to their home addresses, aggregated into CCDs. That might not sound like much, but it’s actually an extraordinarily useful piece of information.

The third piece of data that we keep secret and not for public release, is that we’ve built a very similar thing, but at the Qld state level for Qld state electoral data by combining a massive amount of AEC, ECQ, census data, polling data and about half a dozen other datasets into a large model – what separates it from the norm is that it focuses on the probabilities of vote estimates over the simple “estimated” variety . That lets us deal with uncertainty in a much more sophisticated way. As far as I know, we’re the only mob to have such a thing in Qld that is not a complete dogs breakfast .

We have two layers of this data – the original 2012 State election data at SA1 level or combinations of SA1 level data, and a second layer of the data which is dynamic and evolves according to our ongoing polling research. Because we can measure which demographics are shifting in what seats, across large inter-temporal samples, we can project estimates of the changes of this data into the SA1 level booth catchments (but more importantly, project them as probability distributions of the vote) that aggregate up across cohorts and geographies to equal the seat wide level data results – something you can’t even begin to do unless you undertake the type of programs we’ve undertaken. Which, it should be noted, no one else in the country ever has.

Many people stuck in the 1980s questioned why we undertook such large samples – this is a key part of the answer.

This lets us know where the weaknesses are in every electorate for every sitting member, not only in terms of the most recent election result (telling us where swing voters actually live – because you can compare the election result before last at this level, to the most recent election result at this level – all down to areas between about 10 to 40 street blocks in resolution), but also how those swing voters are currently behaving by utilising the current dynamically projected estimates and attached probabilities to find new areas of weakness, or recognise areas that have slipped out of our cohort targeting window.

If you’re running a community based campaign ground game, an increase of just 10% or 20% efficiency in targeting the right people with the right message at the right time is a massive difference. If we increase our targeting efficiency by just 400%, it will be a  disappointment.

That’s where this matters.

Before we get to some examples of how it all comes together, we also have our campaign recruitment. Currently we have about 35,000 people involved with our community campaign apparatus called Working For Queenslanders  (Feel free to join!)

Yet having volunteers to campaign is not enough – you need organisation to make it all work. It’s all very good and well getting volunteers to go to some place to do some particular thing, but unless there’s also people on the ground to guide it, that are able to deal with the complexities that often arise and can enable the whole exercise to work – well, you’re really just a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

We already have a substantial number of people in Working For Queenslanders with training and organising capabilities, but we also have an enormous in-house training capability which we’ve developed over many years. One of our biggest strengths as a union is our campaign training capability – we often train third party groups. Our folks tell me we can easily train over 1000 people a month at the drop of a hat, more if we had to.

This is all without having pressed the button on any major recruiting program of our own 40,000 odd members for the campaign yet (many of which already have training that can be deployed instantly, are highly intelligent and, let it be said, are completely pissed off with the government).

And this is just us *so far*. It doesn’t include the members or resources of any of the unions we regularly campaign with like, say, United Voice, let alone the wider labour movement in Qld.

That sort of gives you an idea of the numbers involved here and the information and analytical capabilities that make up a modern campaign.

Now, it’s all good and well “knowing” about these things and having built up a campaign volunteer base, a structure and an organisational capability to enable it from top to bottom – but what does it mean in terms of doing? Info without action is just a spreadsheet.

Let’s take a hypothetical, integrated example – but instead of using the State level booth catchment data broken down into the SA1 census level or its current projections (because that’s one of our 3 actual secret pieces of info), we’ll use the Federal equivalent. So the voting data here is 2010 Federal election data (broken down into the old SA1 equivalent called CCD level), and we’ll use some 2011 Census data too – simply to show how it all comes together.

And we’ll use the seat of Moreton, in the southern area of Brisbane to keep it relevant.

Let’s say the government launched a policy that materially affected the welfare of families with dependent children in such a way that the more dependent children a family had, the larger the overall deleterious effect on the household’s finances and general well being.  To keep it visually simple, we’ll just use Moreton as an example here, but it’s infinitely scalable in real time, so this can happen across every part of every electorate we happen to want to target.

Here’s just a corner of the Moreton electorate and the booth results of the 2010 election. Blue booths are where the Coalition won a two party preferred majority, red booths are where the ALP won a two party preferred majority:

Now let’s say we’re only targeting swing voter areas, but with an initial focus on LNP leaning swing voter areas (where the message would be more persuasion driven) as we would have a separate program for ALP leaning swing voters (where the message would be more reinforcement driven). So let’s add the CCD level booth catchment breakdowns for these swing voter areas held by the LNP on margins of 4% or less.

The blue shaded regions are the areas where the estimated ALP two party preferred vote sits between 46% and 50%. Now let’s overlay the census data, where the proportion of the population that are dependent children is 30% or higher (showing us areas where there are large numbers of dependent children for the average family)

The hatched areas which sit on top of the blue areas would be the locations which produce the most efficient hit rate for the swing voter/dependent children target matrix. Also remember that we could widen or tighten our targeting specificity at whim here – this is just an example.

So next we’d overlay the addresses of our campaigners over the top of that map (we’d have a couple of hundred campaigners in the maps shown). We’d then use email and robocalling to contact those campaigners that live either within or next to those targeted areas to ask if they’d be willing to do mail drops into their local neighbourhoods. Those that accept would receive the material with a map of their drop target.

Total turnaround time between policy announcement and customised material hitting the homes of targeted cohorts? Between 18 and 36 hours.

With the key point being nearly all of this is automated and where the number of seats we can cover is only limited by the amount of material we can print. We have a lot of printers.

Now imagine each targeted seat having a number of these neighbourhood based campaign programs happening every week, on multiple issues, in real time as they arise. And not just with previous election data like what is above, but using the current dynamic voting data. And that’s on top of our other activities.

“What sort of activities” I hear you ask?

Well this sort of thing doesn’t just apply to mail drops, but also to the important yet often forgotten area of face to face voter contact. We not only know where to send campaigners to door knock, but who to send, to deliver what messages (often according to who answers the door – male, female, age, with/without dependent children etc), on which particular areas of privatisation that resonate the most when it comes to voting intention of that particular person.

Yet our campaigners aren’t only campaigners, they’re also an enormous local intelligence network.

For example, let’s say a local LNP member in a targeted seat sets up for a community stall somewhere to meet and greet their constituents. A general Saturday morning political institution in the suburbs across Australia.

We’ll know about it within minutes.

We’ll email and robocall every campaigner within 5 km of that LNP Member’s stall and within 20 minutes of finding out, have a line of local constituents 20 deep asking them important and uncomfortable questions, pretty much all day.

Within an hour, we’ll have an anti-privatisation stall set up right next to them. Stalls that are set up in areas where local residents have high opposition rates to privatisation and exhibit (through our polling) a high coefficient for privatisation issues on their voting intention -  i.e. privatisation has a high vote driving effect – then the larger those stalls will be and the more material and human resources will be put into them.

Yet we not only have to react, we can take the campaign to MPs. For example, let’s say an MP says something about the privatisation of aged care. They can expect to see a bus full of ladies over 70 years of age drawn from the local community, occupying the MPs office and having a rollicking good time in the process until the Member answers their questions. Unlike most campaigns, we have a large number of older Australians wanting to be politically active over this – often for the first time in their lives. They’d be pretty keen to get on TV.

These are just a few simple examples of what are really an almost infinite number of campaigning options that utilise the full spectrum of information we have – we already have a formidable list drawn up that’s being added to every day, some simple, some complex, some tactical and some strategic. Now that  “we know”, the things we can and will do are not just much larger in scope, but also more efficient and focused and much more sophisticated.

We know who to target, where, why, with what message based on their demographics, their geography, using which specific areas of the privatisation of public services that are most salient and relevant to their lives, at the local community level, delivered by their neighbours, by their friends and by their families across all of Qld.

But most importantly, at the very center of it all will be local constituents, campaigning locally, defending what is a *super majority* of Queensland public opinion.

On the more strategic side, our research program has also allowed us to identify those seats where our campaign can make the difference between the seat remaining LNP or moving to anyone else.

Putting large amounts of resources into seats that will fall anyway would be a waste. Instead, we’ll be hunting up the pendulum – sometimes so far up the pendulum you need to take a packed lunch – because those are the seats that the research suggests can be moved. We’re not sure how many we’ll target yet – that call will be made soon enough – but it’ll likely be somewhere between 20 and 40.

This is just the ground game aspect of the campaign. There’s also the usual advertising, focus groups, comms research, media stuff, online etc etc. The bits and pieces that every campaign has.

However, the thing every campaign doesn’t have is a formidable, research intensive, community level ground game consisting of tens of thousands of active local participants.

Essentially we’re just applying the best of the resources of the early 21st century, to early 20th century community organising. But what that actually requires under the bonnet is a level of political information and analytics that’s never really been needed by a campaign before, so that it can be transformed into the knowledge required to enable the people with the real skills – our union campaign folks and our organisers – to achieve magnitudes of order more than they ordinarily could do without it.

We might be the first organisation to do this in Australia – but we’ll only be the first.

While that’s pretty exciting in many ways, the downside is that the political knowledge gap between the public (including political observers) and key parts of the political system will grow even further apart.

And that is probably not a very good thing at all. So this is our contribution to prevent that very thing from happening as best we can – the anatomy of a modern campaign.

The sample size was 36,323 conducted across all 89 Qld electorates. The poll asked the following questions:

1. State Voting Intentions

The Qld State government is currently considering a major report into the way Queensland is run. This report, called the Costello Report, recommends that many public services be sold and outsourced to the private sector.

2. Would you support or oppose the privatisation of electricity and infrastructure assets in Qld?

3. Would you support or oppose the privatisation and outsourcing of hospitals and public health services in Qld?

4. Would you support or oppose the privatisation and outsourcing  of community services such as disability support and child protection?

5. If the Liberal National Party state government were to follow the recommendations of the Costello report and privatise these public services, would that make you more or less likely to vote for the Liberal National Party at the next election?

6. If the Liberal National Party  state government called an election to seek a mandate from the Queensland people to privatise public services, which of the following would receive your first preference vote? If you are undecided to which do you even have a slight leaning?

The Statel level results can be seen over at ReachTEL, but we’ll break them down into 18 smaller groups of seat aggregations called micro-regions that have solid sample sizes. Firstly, the names of the micro-regions, the electorates they contain, and a map of the region so you can get a handle on what it actually means

Inner City: Ashgrove, Brisbane Central, Bulimba, South Brisbane, Stafford, Mt Coot-tha

Brisbane East: Clayfield, Lytton, Chatsworth, Capalaba, Cleaveland

Brisbane North West Circle: Aspley, Everton, Ferny Grove, Moggill

North Bayside: Nudgee, Sandgate, Redcliffe

Brisbane Outer North: Murrumba, Kallangur, Morayfield, Pine Rivers

Brisbane South West: Ipswich, Ipswich West, Inala, Bundamba

Brisbane Inner South: Mt Ommaney, Indooroopilly, Sunnybank, Greenslopes, Mansfield, Yeerongpilly

Brisbane South East: Woodridge, Stretton, Logan, Waterford, Springwood, Algester

Gold Coast North: Redlands, Coomera, Albert, Broadwater, Gaven

Gold Coast South: Southport, Surfers Paradise, Mermaid Beach, Currumbin, Medgeeraba

North West Corridor: Callide, Gregory, Mt Isa, Dalrymple, Nanango

South West: Beaudesert, Southern Downs, Lockyer, Toowoomba North, Toowoomba South, Warrego, Condamine

Sunshine Coast South: Pumicestone, Glass House, Caloundra, Kawana, Buderim

Sunshine Coast North: Maroochydore, Nicklin, Noosa, Gympie

Fraser Coast/Wide Bay: Maryborough, Hervey Bay, Bundaberg, Burnett

Central Coast: Gladstone, Rockhampton, Keppel, Mirani, Mackay, Whitsunday

North Qld: Burdekin, Townsville, Mundingburra, Thuringowa

Far North Qld: Mulgrave, Barron River, Cook, Hinchinbrook, Cairns

These micro-regions carry the following sample sizes and margins of error:

Now all the process stuff is out of the way, on with the questions and results!

Question 1: Voting Intentions:

Question 2. Privatisation of electricity and infrastructure assets:

Question 3: Privatisation of hospitals and outsourcing of public health services:

Question 4: Privatisation and outsourcing  of community services such as disability support and child protection.    

Question 5: If the Liberal National Party state government were to follow the recommendations of the Costello report and privatise these public services, would that make you more or less likely to vote for the Liberal National Party at the next election?  

Question 6: If the Liberal National Party  state government called an election to seek a mandate from the Queensland people to privatise public services, which of the following would receive your first preference vote? If you are undecided to which do you even have a slight leaning?

Finally, some swing figures on all those. First up – the 2012 Election Results for context:

Now the Primary Vote Swings involved with Question 1 – the current voting intentions. Notice the big variations in regional swings with the LNP suffering big swings against them already in the cities, yet have strengthened their own vote in some of the regional areas.

Next, the primary vote swings involved with question 6 – an election where the Newman government was seeking a privatisation mandate.

Finally, the difference between the two – or the additional swing induced by opposition to privatisation

There’s a lot to absorb here – we’ll do some actual analysis of the figures in a later post

While the carbon tax is often described as the single driver for the government’s recovery in public support, if we zoom in to the period since March this year, we find a slightly more complicated story.

The ALP actually bottomed out around the end of May/beginning of June, before recovering slowly through the rest of June and July. It wasn’t until August – a full month after the carbon tax came in and Whyalla remained on  the map – that a sharp change in the acceleration of the recovery appeared, and one that has continued to this day. This is actually the norm of the way major public policy events impact upon polling. It takes time for information to be heard, then absorbed and finally politically processed by peoples noggins. Most people slow cook information that is relevant to their political opinion.

On the primary votes, we’ve seen an even stronger recovery for the government than with the headline two party preferred – the ALP now breaking the 36 point barrier for the first time since November 2010.

Some of this is coming off the Coalition, with their primary vote now the lowest it’s been since March 2011.

However, also boosting the government’s primary support is the fading of the Green vote – slipping through the double digit barrier for the first time this term – and reaching trend lows not seen since the first quarter of 2010, before the last election.

Currently, the point estimates on the trend lines come in like this:

Let’s talk about Horse Race commentary – that breathless hyperbole about changes in public opinion that’s generated every time a new poll comes out. We have armies of allegedly intelligent people  -the top political writers in Australian journalism – writing column miles of allegedly serious analysis about how the latest poll did this or that and what it means for Abbott, Gillard, the nation etc. This analysis then dominates the news cycle in such a way that ordinarily intelligent politicians jump on the bandwagon and react to it, which then generates a brand new news cycle of the reaction, then further breathless reporting and analysis of the reaction to the reaction. And so on it goes until everyone disappears up their own meta-sphincter, by which time a new poll is released and the whole batshit crazy process starts again.

Here’s something to chew over – the actual underlying content of this whole circus is little more than random numbers behaving randomly.

Let me explain.

To start with, here’s what the ALP two party preferred looks like with our Pollytrend against all the poll results.

The poll to poll movements (which here include Essential Report, Newspoll, Nielsen, Galaxy and Morgan’s phone polling) are extremely noisy – but it’s what we expect. Polls are noisy because they’re actually probability distributions trying to capture underlying reality, with a mean of the headline result and standard deviation related to their sample size. It’s also worth looking at the poll to poll change vs the change in Pollytrend, to highlight the noise involved.

It’s not unusual to get poll to poll movements of up to 6 points between polls, when the underlying trend hasn’t moved at all. It’s also a good lesson for why you should only ever compare poll movements ‘like with like’ across time – Newspoll with Newspoll, Essential with Essential etc.

What our trend measure does is cut through that noise.  Not only the noise created by sampling error – what you see described as the margin of error of a given poll, but also the relative leans of each pollster. Some polls lean slightly towards the ALP and some slightly towards the Coalition relative to each other, in a fairly consistent manner.

If we take the difference between each pollsters results and the equivalent Pollytrend estimate for the same time the poll was in the field, what we would expect to see if both our trend measure is an accurate trend and the polls behave as polls theoretically should, is a nice neat series of normal distributions (think bell curves) that not only show the relative lean of each pollster, but the spread of their polling results relative to the trend over time. In fact, that is actually what we do see:

This is a histogram where the bars show how often each pollster produces a result X number of points away from the Pollytrend. The lines are the hypothetical normal distributions associated with the spread of each pollster.

Because there aren’t enough Nielsen, Galaxy and Morgan phone polls to robustly measure their individual distributions, I pooled them together. Consequently, it’s not really worth saying much about them except that collectively they lean 0.4% on average to the Coalition compared to Pollytrend.

Essential Report, being a pollster that uses a rolling two week average for its polls, produces a much tighter looking bell curve as a result of that particular methodology. Averaging out of two weeks knocks a fair bit of noise out of the system. It leans  0.6 points towards the ALP relative to Pollytrend.

Finally, Newspoll has a relative lean towards the ALP of 0.6 points. Also worth noting that I have a handful of unpublished polls that go into the trend line – they’re all phone polls from academic and commercial research that use political cross tabs. They have a relative lean of 0.3 points towards the Coalition.

Importantly, Essential Report and Newspoll produce results that are statistically indistinguishable from the type of normal distribution we would expect them to have if they were behaving in a perfectly functioning theoretical manner.

So this tell us that both our trend and the pollsters are operating as they theoretically should be – producing results with the error sizes we would expect, as often as we would expect, as a consequence of the type of random sampling that polling is based on.

Now let’s look at how Essential Report and Newspoll track Pollytrend.

Now let’s turn those charts into the poll result to poll result change, and measuring it against the Pollytrend to Pollytrend change for the same periods.

First Essential Report:

As a result of the rolling average Essential uses, it knocks a lot of noise of the system, so we usually only see 1 point poll to poll movements if any movement at all.  The occasional 2 point movement appears (4 times this term) and only once have we seen a three point movement.

Now let’s look at Newspoll.

Here we see Newspoll regularly having two, three and four point movements poll to poll, and 3 occasions having movements over 4 points. Again, this is exactly what we expect a poll with a sample size a bit over 1000 to behave like.

Now let’s go a step further and highlight size of the Horserace commentary polling problem. Let’s measure the difference between Newspoll’s poll to poll movement and the difference between the equivalent trend to trend movement e.g If Newspoll goes from 46 to 49 (3 points) and the trend goes from 46 to 47 (1 point), then the difference between them is 2 points i.e. Newspoll over the period moved 2 points more than the underlying change in public opinion actually moved according to the trend.

Similarly, if Newspoll moved from 48 to 46 ( a change of -2 points) and the trend moved over the same period from 47 to 48 (a change of +1 point), the difference between them is 3 points i.e. Newspoll over the period moved 3 points more than the underlying change in public opinion actually moved according to the trend.

This chart shows the size of the movement in Newspoll *over and above* the way public opinion actually moved during the polling periods, with three, four and five point random movements being regular occurrences.

Now think of all those breathless stories – “ALP CRASHES 4 POINTS BECAUSE OF SOMETHING I’VE JUST MADE UP, “NEWSPOLL SURGE RENEWS LEADERSHIP SPECULATION”, “COALITION VOTE PLUMETS BECAUSE OF CHANGES TO THE ACTS INTERPRETATION ACT” etc etc

None of it is true – all of it is based on people reporting random numbers, or people reacting to people reporting random numbers.

They’re not just random numbers because I’m saying it either – they’re random numbers because that’s what the maths tells us. Theoretically, we would expect the distribution of these results to be a normal distribution (think bell curve) with a mean of zero and about 2 Newspoll “margins of error” wide each side. Actually it would be just under 2 margins of error wide, but there would be a little bit extra added because of rounding issues – Newspoll publishes their results to the nearest whole percentage point. Since Newspoll has an MoE of 3 points, we’d expect the distribution to be about 6 points wide each side of the mean.

This is what we actually see.

Well look at that, we have a normal distribution (using a Jarque–Bera test), with a mean of zero and a spread 2 margins of error wide.

This is the mechanics of Horserace commentary.

Breathlessly reporting random numbers as fundamentally important issues that drive our media and political system down the road to utter absurdity.

Imagine if half our political coverage was based on the Lotto numbers. If this week’s Lotto results summed to be 224, about 40 above the expected mean – would everyone piss half their week up the wall opining over what this random event means for Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard? Would politicians fall over themselves to react to the reporting of these random numbers? Would every second political story be framed through the prism of a higher than expected sum of the Lotto results?

Of course it fucking wouldn’t!

They wouldn’t do it with random numbers like Lotto, but they sure as shit do it with random numbers in polling. Every week, week in week out.

Looking deep into one’s navel about what a set of random numbers mean for politics doesn’t make you look clever –it actually makes you look like an idiot.

—–

Finally, a lot of folks have asked if we can do the equivalent here of what Nate Silver does in the US. The answer is both Yes and No – not only because of the fundamentally different political systems between our two countries (like the US having separate executives and legislatures), but also because of the massive difference in the polling and types of polling in each country.

It’s perhaps best explained if rather than ask whether we can do that here, if we look instead at what Nate would have to do if he had our data to work with, rather than the flood of state and national polls that the US enjoys.

If Nate had to deal with the equivalent of our polling and system, he’d have to predict which party would achieve a majority in the House of Congress (and perhaps the size of the majority) using 3 regular and two irregular national tracking polls, and where the only state polls undertaken were in fact groupings of 10 or so states combined, of varying sizes (with no breakdowns between the states making up any particular group), and where a poll came out for each of those groups only once every 2 or 3 months.

It’s a bit different down here.

The Newspoll was taken across the three month period from July to September – where Newspoll adds Qld State-based political questions to their Qld component of their regular fortnightly national sample.  After 3 months, Newspoll has a large enough Qld sample to publish the Qld based results.

In the ordinary course of events at the state level, quarterly results like this tell a pretty normal story – but Qld has been far from ordinary over the last few months, so the Newspoll component from the early part of its sample becomes a bit of an exercise in nostalgia and telling us next to nothing about what has happened *within* the long period of the sample.

To demonstrate how timeliness in polling is important when it comes to understanding what is actually happening among the population you’re measuring, we can compare monthly ReachTEL polls that were taken over the same three month period that the Qld Newspoll was taken.

First up – let’s look at the two party preferred results over the July to September period.

The ReachTEL monthly polling averaged out over the 3 months produces an identical result to the Newspoll that was in the field across that same period.  Yet the polls tell two completely different stories because of the timeliness involved. Newspoll says the LNP has experienced a 3% swing away from it since the election and everything you’ve seen happening in Qld over the last few months has been little more than theatre.

The actual story is how the Newman government’s support has contracted from 68% in early July to 55% today – a massive 13 point drop – and one much more compatible with the events we have all witnessed in Qld.

We also see the same thing with the primary votes. Newspoll had Katter at a fairly ridiculous 1% in this poll (compared to their election result of 11.5%) – suggesting that they may not have added Katter to the list of party names they read out to respondents – yet Newspoll also had the broad “Others” at a massive 12 points.

UPDATE: Newspoll actually had Katter’s Australia Party on the readouts to respondents, making it an even more extraordinary result!

Comparing the ReachTEL and Newspoll results over the period tells the story – especially if we compare like with like and add the Others vote to the Katter Australia Party vote to accommodate Newpsoll’s weird treatment of KAP as 1%’ers. Again the results are nearly identical.

The Newspoll story is a 2 point primary swing away from the LNP compared to the election – a nothing to see here result – compared with the 12 point swing away from the Newman government since July. Same results for the two pollsters over the 3 months, but Newspoll washes out the underlying dynamics.

The approval ratings of Campbell Newman also exhibit the same behaviour. While Newspoll measures “satisfaction”, ReachTEL measures performance in terms very good, good, indifferent, poor and very poor. So we can use ReachTEL’s Total Good and Total Poor to compare with Newspoll’s Satisfied and Dissatisfied to give us a handle on generic approval.

Even with different questions containing different descriptions of generic approval, the results are again almost identical, and again tell two completely different stories. The Newspoll story is that Newman still popular while the ReachTEL story shows him crashing and burning like no other leader of a new government has in recent history. For instance, we can compare Newman’s approval with a bunch of other leaders of new governments to show the extent of the crash (click to expand).

So let this be a lesson in the dangers of timeliness when it comes to polling. Polling aggregated over long periods of time in dynamic political environments runs the risk of telling you a story that is at best meaningless and at worst completely wrong. Here the Newspoll and ReachTEL results averaged over the same period give identical results – but underneath, taking account of timeliness – the polls tell a completely different story. One is an accurate reflection of current Qld voter behaviour and the dynamics involved, the other is just bad analysis.

Which are all kinds of self-explanatory.

Now for the comparatively serious business – the primary dynamic of voter perception on federal politics since the end of 2007.

We all know that there’s a relationship between the vote a government receives in the polls and the satisfaction with the Prime Minister of the day. It’s hardly ground breaking stuff – to show how it all plays out over the very long run (say, since 1986) we can simply chart the two party preferred vote of the government of the day against the Prime Minister’s satisfaction rating, and do it again with the net satisfaction rating (where it’s Satisfaction minus Dissatisfaction). We’ll use Newspoll monthly averages.

I’ve added a simple linear regression line there to make the point – but it’s one worth covering quickly. The relationship here is statistically significant to all the usual levels and if we just look at that last chart which compares the two party preferred vote of the government against the Prime Minister’s net satisfaction rating, we find that changes in net satisfaction explain a little over half of the variation in the two party preferred vote over the long term since 1986.

The stats just happen to play out in such a (fortuitous) way that if the net satisfaction of the Prime Minister was exactly zero – where there were as many people equally as satisfied with the PM as there were dissatisfied – we would expect the two party preferred vote of the government to be exactly 50% to the nearest whole percentage.  For every 10 point change in net satisfaction, we’d expect the two party preferred vote to change  by 1.3 points – towards the government with net satisfaction increases and away from the government with net satisfaction decreases.

So over the long term it’s been a solid relationship, but not an overwhelmingly dominant one – with the dynamic explaining 55% of the variation in the government’s two party preferred.

Before we go any further, it’s worth noting that the relationship between the net satisfaction of the leader of the opposition and the two party preferred vote of the opposition is completely non-existent over the long term.

A drunk bloke shooting paintballs on a chart comes to mind with that particular graphic.

So the vote of the government is intrinsically linked to satisfaction levels of the Prime Minister in the general case, and the public’s satisfaction or otherwise with the opposition leader of the day is really neither here nor there. It’s all about the government/PM dynamic as far as this goes, and how the opposition strategies and tactics operate within that constraint. So if you tear down the PM, the government’s vote will go with it – hardly rocket science – but it explains a lot.

However, what you may not know, is that while this relationship holds for all federal governments collectively since 1986 (as we’ve seen), it also holds for each individual government since 1986 –  but with significant differences between them.

Let’s have a look at how the relationship played out in the Hawke/Keating government.

Through the Hawke/Keating period between 1986 (which is as far back as Newspoll goes by the way) and its end in 1996, the dynamic was very similar to what we saw looking at all governments together. A 10 point change in net satisfaction of Hawke/Keating would be expected to come with a change in the two party preferred vote of the government of 1.3, with the dynamics explaining 52.5% of the variation on the government vote.

Moving on to Howard, we have:

Here the variation in Howard’s net satisfaction rating (between 1996 and 2007) only explained 41% of the variation in the Howard government’s two party preferred vote, significantly less than the proportion explained during the Hawke/Keating government it replaced.

Yet for every 10 point increase in Howard’s net satisfaction, we’d expect the two party preferred vote of the Howard government to move by 1.5 points – slightly more than for the Hawke/Keating government it replaced.

So while changes in Howard’s net satisfaction ratings resulted, on average, in larger changes to the Howard government vote than occurred under Hawke/Keating, there was much more variation in the size of those changes.

Now let’s move to the Rudd/Gillard era – it’s quite spectacular.

Changes in the net satisfaction rating of the Prime Minister explains 89% (!!) of the variation in the two party preferred vote – over twice that of the Howard government. For every 10 point change in the net satisfaction rating of the PM, the Labor government two party preferred vote changed, on average, by over 1.7 points – the highest of the three governments.

The dynamic between the PMs satisfaction and the government’s vote during the Rudd/Gillard era is utterly dominant. But wait! [nerd time!] It’s so dominant, that even that incredible explanatory power of 89% very likely underestimates the true strength of the relationship because of sampling error and rounding errors in the polls that we’re using for analysis.

We know that polls aren’t dot points, but are approximately normal probability distributions (think “bell curve”) with a mean of the published poll result and a standard deviation of some particular size that is a function of the sample size of the poll itself – that’s where our margin of error comes from for each poll. So the statistical relationship between the PM’s net satisfaction ratings and government’s TPP will have some noise in it simply from sampling error, plus a small additional noise component from rounding issues. How much on the rounding issues? Well, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are rounded to the nearest whole number when published, and we are subtracting one from the other to get net satisfaction (adding up to 0.9 points of rounding error on net satisfaction and up to 0.5 on the two party preferred results)

So let’s run a hypothetical – let’s assume that the exact quantitative relationship between net satisfaction and the government vote in the Rudd/Gillard era is the regression line in the above chart – where the two party preferred is 50.078 when net satisfaction is zero, and where a 1 point change in net satisfaction comes with a 0.1718 change in two party preferred. In this hypothetical world, the true underlying values of each poll would fall exactly on that line every time.

But we have noise in the polls. Because we can finely estimate the probability distributions of the components that make up the noise, we can model what that noise would look like using a bit of monte carlo simulation. So in our hypothetical world where we knew that linear relation between net satisfaction and TPP was exactly true, exactly all of the time, what would Newspoll charts look like if they tried to measure it, simply because of the statistical noise involved? Well here’s 4 examples (click on each chart to expand it)

It looks pretty close to what Newspoll has actually measured. After 100,000 iterations (or examples) of this simulation, the R-squared value (the one that tells us what proportion of the variation in the two party preferred results can be explained by variations in the net satisfaction ratings) averages 91.1%.

So even with a hypothetical “perfect relationship” between net satisfaction and government two party preferred, we would expect to see polling produce R squares of only around 91% – with the 9% unexplained residual being created purely through statistical and methodological issues associated with the underlying data generation and presentation process.

With the real world Newspoll results giving us 89%, the actual strength of the true underlying relationship is quite likely higher than that –  making it simply astonishing.

“But correlation isn’t causation” I hear you say! And you’d be right – so let’s go a step further and look not just at correlation, but peer as best we can into causation.

One of the tests we have available is Granger Causality – which tests whether one time series can predict future values of another time series. It’s not a measure of perfect causality – for no such thing generically exists – but it’s a measure of a practical causality.

Running Granger Causality tests on our two series (which are called NETSATGOV and TPPGOV in my database – representing PM net satisfaction and the government two party preferred respectively), this is what we get on a month by month change basis for all of the government’s we’re looking at, as well as over the entire period since 1986.

So we can reject the null hypothesis that net satisfaction does not Granger Cause the two party preferred vote (suggesting that in actuality it *does* granger cause TPP), and we cannot reject the null hypothesis that TPP does not Granger Cause net satisfaction (telling us that TPP doesn’t Granger Cause net satisfaction).

So on a month by month basis, net satisfaction Granger Causes the government’s vote. That’s the effective direction of practical causality that we can measure.

Over periods of time longer than month-by-month, both series Granger Cause each other – suggesting what’s commonly known as a feedback loop. Using some factor analysis and Vector Autoregression Models, the feedback runs about 70/30 in favour of net satisfaction.

To summarise –  looking at all governments since 1986, over the short term, changes in net satisfaction cause changes in the government vote, while over the medium term, a feedback loop develops between net satisfaction and the two party preferred vote – but where net satisfaction is the primary driver of around 70% of that medium term relationship.

However, while the feedback loop is about 70/30 over the whole period, for Hawke/Keating and Howard it was closer to 60/40 while for Rudd/Gillard it is closer to 80/20.

Now we know the direction of the correlation between PM satisfaction and the vote, it’s probably a good time for a recap.

With nearly 90% of the change in the vote of the Rudd/Gillard governments being driven by changes in the public perception of the Prime Minister – twice that of the Howard government and astonishing in its own right as a number – this is quite simply the primary dynamic of federal politics over the last four and a half years.

Our public perceptions of leadership have become all encompassing of our politics . Change perceptions of that leadership, change the vote – drive perceptions of the PM into the dirt, drive the government’s vote into the dirt with it. Lift the public’s satisfaction with the PM up, the government vote gets dragged up too.. If you want to understand the dynamics of federal politics, you need to recognise the prism through which voters are seeing and behaving to politics and the actual nature of the battlefield – this is it.

The electoral fortunes of the government since 2008 have been effectively drifting on whatever currents of public perception about the Prime Minister were flowing at the time. The Howard and Hawke/Keating governments before them appeared to have developed some form of institutional anchor that ameliorated the voting consequences of the vagaries of Prime Ministerial perceptions (to about half of what is happening today according to the stats). Though I often wonder how Hawke, Keating and Howard would have operated in today’s media environment where facts are generally considered to be optional.

Whether it’s the government, or us, or the media environment (or some combination thereof) that has caused this dynamic, the one thing we do know is that leadership matters more today than it has at any time over the last 25 years. The Prime Minister today doesn’t just lead the government – as far as voter perceptions and voting intentions go, they *are* the government.

Small note: The sidebar charts have Gremlins – they’ll be updated with the latest data when it’s solved.

In Queensland, we’ve just completed the first 100 days of the Newman Government, otherwise known as Campbell Newman’s 100 day magical mystery tour – a sort of prolonged orientation week for new front benchers as they attend lots of events, go to a lot of meetings and where the public service tries their best to make them realise that they’re actually running the show now, and that it’s time for them to get their shit together.

A few of Ministers have surprised people – adapting to the realities of government much quicker than many thought they would. Some have taken to it like naturals.

Others however, too many in fact, haven’t quite figured it all out yet – others still, don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to even start acting like grownups.

Let me introduce you to Tim Nicholls – Tim doesn’t realise that he’s actually the Queensland Treasurer. He knows he is something Treasurerish, with his better office, people actually answering his calls, journalists actually attending his press conferences. He gets to attend swankier events and has a substantially larger hospitality budget – but he still doesn’t realise that he’s actually the Treasurer.

You can tell, as he still behaves as if he were in opposition – a place in Qld where  it has historically been considered acceptable practice to just make things up as required. The transition from ad hoc political sloganeer to serious political institution isn’t going well for Mr Nicholls.

The alleged Treasurer recently wrote an article for the Brisbane Times – it’s well worth pulling it apart to highlight the lazy nonsense that’s starting to pervade what should be the serious side of Qld politics.

It begins:

Temporary contract workers in the public service were “cruelly strung along” by the former government, argues Treasurer Tim Nicholls.

The Newman government’s position on the size of the public sector is quite clear – our overriding principle is to preserve as many jobs as possible.

This government has both a responsibility and a mandate to pay down Labor’s debt.

It is a responsibility we all share.

And it is with that thought in mind that I ask members of the public sector to carefully consider demands for higher wages.

Let us then carefully consider these demands – but more importantly,  a big bunch of public policy issues that accompany them – for at least then, there will be exactly one of us that has decided to do so.

It’s a question of high wage growth versus job cuts.

By turning down wage offers that are more than fair, union members will be jeopardising not only their colleagues’ jobs but also the state’s future prosperity.

The “wage offers” the alleged Treasurer is talking about are actually based on Tim Nicholls and Campbell Newman making an assumption that average annual inflation across the next three years – the life of the coming agreement – will be 1.6%.

No – that’s not a typo.

Not for this dynamic duo, that awkward reality where the Reserve Bank of Australia runs an inflation targeting regime designed to keep inflation between a 2% and 3% band over the medium and long term.  To put this piece of ridiculous economic piffle into some context, let’s look at the most recent RBA Statement on Monetary Policy and the median inflation expectations contained within it (pages 64 and 67)

They have inflation forecasts 60 to 90 basis points lower than everyone else! If Nicholls wants to give real wage cuts, he should simply be honest about it. But as we’ll see, honesty isn’t often the best policy for the alleged Treasurer.

The Queensland government coffers are empty. State debt is heading for $100 billion. Unions can thank their Labor ‘mates’ for that.

Eleventy bazillion in fact – but that’s another laugh for another time. The only thing more consistent about new governments than rampaging egos are the discovery of magical budget black holes.

So when unions demand more money for their members it stands to reason expenses must be reduced elsewhere.

Rationalising the public service is not a task we relish. Nor do we embark on it lightly or frivolously.

There are many hardworking and dedicated public servants who have been let down by a Labor government that made short-term decisions for their own political benefit.

The Commission of Audit Interim Report found that in the past decade the size of the Queensland public service was allowed to grow by an unsustainable 41 per cent. It has become too top-heavy. Had the public service grown at the same rate as population, we’d have 18,500 fewer public servants, and expenses would be $1.5 billion lower.

It’s one of those “if my aunty had a willy, she’d be my uncle” things.

Let’s have a look at these figures – they’re quite enlightening and expose a pretty poor understanding of Qld public policy history. All figures are available from the Qld Public Service Commission’s annual reports from 2001 to 2011. For 2012 numbers, I’m using the 2012 March Quarter update on the same site.

To start with, here’s Qld public service numbers by the key departments – Health, Police, Education and Communities (which is where child safety and disability services reside) since 2001. (click to expand all these charts)

Now, let’s combine those together and call it HPEC and chart it with “the rest of the public service” which we’ll call “Other”.

That’s the entire Qld public service in that above chart.

Now, let’s look at that last chart, but where HPEC and “Others” (the rest of the public service) are done as proportions of the Qld population.

Now the story starts to be painted. The raw growth in the Qld public sector total numbers came from Health, Education, Communities and Police. The relative growth came from Health, Police and Communities – which we can see here:

While the total public service grew by 38% compared to population growth of 25%, Health, Police and Communities were where the actual growth came from – while Education and the rest of the public service grew at a slower rate than population growth. Education and the rest of public service became more efficient over that time – much more efficient, with education delivering an additional year of schooling, and the rest of the public service implementing the largest legislative and policy agenda that Qld had seen over any decade period

The reason health grew is simple – it was a response to the Qld Health crisis, which you may remember from such classic hits as Dr Death and Bundaberg Hospital. What happened for those uninitiated in the ways and means of Qld’s institutional killing and maiming, the health and hospital system was understaffed and so poorly organised to the point where basic accountability and transparency systems ceased to function, or in many cases, ceased to effectively exist at all. It wasn’t just Bundaberg hospital either – Bundaberg just happened to be the canary in the coalmine. The problems found at Bundaberg were also found across the entire Qld hospital system, but mostly to a lesser degree of magnitude… lesser but growing.

We were on the verge of having a whole lot of Bundaberg hospitals – so the Health Action Plan was created, which attempted to deal with the situation. As a result of more doctors, nurses and health professionals being brought into the system (and the construction of a much more accountable system along with it), the proportion of front line workers in Health jumped from around the 81% mark in 2001 to 86% today. Similarly, over that period, the case load of hospitals has also increased significantly.

With Police growth – that’s pretty self explanatory.

Communities on the other hand has been largely driven by child safety and child protection issues rising from what was the appalling state of Qld’s capabilities in those regards. So much so, that Newman himself has just initiated a major inquiry into the child protection system. The irony being that it will recommend more staff.

So that’s why, policy wise, we witnessed the growth we did in the Qld public service – ostensibly to deal with a health and child protection crisis, and adding more police.

When Tim Nicholls says: “Had the public service grown at the same rate as population, we’d have 18,500 fewer public servants, and expenses would be $1.5 billion lower.”

Let’s look at what that would mean:

I’m using more updated numbers than Nicholls – March quarter 2012 figures. What we see is that if the public service grew at the same rate as the Qld population, we’d have 17,725 fewer people in Health, 3,594 fewer in Communities and 1,002 less in Police.  Ironically, we’d also have 1,346 more people in Education and 418 more in the rest of the public service – but let’s not go there. 86% of the increase over and above population growth came directly from Health.

To give an idea of what’s involved here with the alleged Treasurer’s ideal public service numbers – i.e. a position he’s plucked straight from his posterior with little to no thought at all -  if we look at the health action plan and it’s follow through (small pdf file), it made the number of front line health workers 85.8% as of June last year (a simple calculation from that link – 58,280 of the 69,221 health employees were front line)

Even if we assume it’s down to 85% (when there’s absolutely no reason to, just being generous to Tim as he appears to need all the generosity he can get), that means there’s only 10,300 odd non-frontline health staff, and he reckons there’s 17,725 too many.

According to the alleged Treasurer, he’s going to need to cut all non-front line staff (don’t ask who handles Hospital logistics) and still needs to cut over 7,000 front line staff on top, just to get back to his fantasy ideal of the public service in Health alone.

Back to the days of Bundaberg – on steroids – and more killing and maiming. The problem the alleged Treasurer faces is that his public service numbers don’t stack up to anyone that knows anything about Qld public policy, or how we got to where we are.

Tim Nicholls continues:

Almost half the state’s revenue this financial year will be spent paying public servants’ wages and superannuation.

A fascinating statistic – although one that loses a bit of its clout if you mention that this actually happens every year. State governments supply public services, public services provided by actual people called public servants – you don’t get one without the other. It can be a tough concept to get your noggin around.

If we track employee expenses and revenue from the General Government Sector Operating Statement of budgets going back to 2003/04,  we get a pretty unexciting chart.

 Weekly earnings of Queensland public sector workers have increased by 16.7 per cent in the past decade, compared to 12.7 nationally.

If wages have increased by 16.7% in a decade, that would be very bad news indeed – since inflation over the period from 2001 to 2011 was actually 33.1% (Try it yourself with the RBA inflation calculator).  No wonder Tim is offering real wage cuts as wage offers, if he reckons a 16% real wage cut over a decade was absolutely fantastic stuff.

If you’re confused about now, the alleged Treasurer probably meant “real wage” rises – although who really knows. If we ever get to the point where analysing what Tim Nicholls “actually means” becomes a necessity on any given economic topic, it’s probably safe to say that we’ve already lost.

Meanwhile, we can jump over to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and have a look ourselves.

The period the alleged Treasurer is concerned with here spans the 2000/2001 through to 2010/11 financial years.  The first release of ABS 6302.2 after July 1^st of each year comes in August, so that’s the data we’ll use here.

As you can see – the Qld public sector average weekly earnings (Full time, adult, ordinary time earnings) grew 57.7% over the period compared to 54.3% growth for the national public sector average. But what you can also see is that Qld public sector wages grew from being 95.3% of the national public sector average in August 2001, to be 97.4% of the public sector national average in August 2011.

Similarly, Qld private sector wages grew 70.4% over the period, compared to 60.4% nationally – and changed from being 91.9% of the average national private sector wage in 2001 to being 97.6% in 2011

In other words, Qld public sector wages grew faster than the national public sector average, but grew slower than Qld and Australian private sector wages and are still less than the national public sector average.

The reason for this is pretty clear – Qld was a low skill, low wage economy for most of its existence and has only recently started to catch up to the rest of Australia. The private sector in Qld was particularly lower skilled in terms of education and training compared to the broader Australian private sector, and as the skill level of the Qld labour market increased, and as the economy itself increased in sophistication and value production,  we witnessed substantially higher private sector wage increases than the national average. Effectively the skill/wage gap closed between Qld and the rest of the economy as Qld became better educated and developed more sophisticated vocational skill sets to match a much more sophisticated economy. You can also add to that the resources boom, which added higher value production to the Qld private sector economy.

The public sector in Qld, however, already had a higher level of education and training compared to the Qld private sector, and the skills/wage gap between the Qld and National public sectors was much smaller to begin with.

Getting back to the remarks from the alleged Treasurer – it is true that Qld public sector wages grew faster than the national public sector average. They grew from being 95.3% of the national average in 2001 to being 97.4% of the national average in 2011 -  reflecting a state wide pattern of higher than national wages growth as we closed the gap between us and the rest of Australia. But while we closed the gap, we are still below the national average.

While wage increases for public servants have been markedly higher than inflation in recent years, many small business owners and private sector employees have struggled to make ends meet. They have been forced to pay rising taxes, fees and charges, without receiving any increase in their take home pay.

Ahem

We’ll do real wages in a bit.

Many private companies during the global financial crisis made the tough decision to freeze employee wages and recruitment. The employees at these companies may not have liked having their wages frozen, but accepted it was better than the alternative of losing their jobs. Even before the economic slowdown, real pay rises (above inflation) were only offered in exchange for productivity gains or increased responsibility.

Meanwhile, at ABS 6302.2 (where we were just at) and ABS 6401.0 (Consumer Price Index), we can combine those to give us some comparable real wage increases by sector – Tim’s “real pay rises (above inflation)”.

As we’ve already seen, Qld private sector wages over the decade grew at a much faster rate than Qld public sector wages – and everyone experienced the same inflation rate. But let’s look at the period covering the global financial crisis – from 2008 through to today. You never know, Tim may have actually got something right.

Real wage rises (wage rises adjusting for inflation) since the beginning of 2008 have averaged 2.8% per year for the Qld private sector and 1.9% per year for the Qld public sector.

While private sector real wage growth did freeze for a couple of quarters, it recovered quickly, and over the entire financial crisis has outstripped public sector wage growth.

When the private sector was hit by the GFC, they reduced output as a result of collapsing demand. As a consequence of that reduced output, they had a few quarters of wage restraint.

The output of the public service is public services – it isn’t an abstract concept – it’s health, police, fire fighters, child protection, education etc. The demand for public services didn’t collapse, isn’t collapsing, and won’t collapse over the forward estimates. Far from it, demand for Qld public services has, and is continuing to increase – in some areas increasing dramatically.

Using the alleged Treasurer’s own argument, if he wants a wage freeze because of collapsed output, as occurred in the private sector during the GFC, then what public services does he intend to reduce the output of?

Does he even know? Does he even understand the question?

During recent enterprise bargaining agreement negotiations we offered fair and reasonable pay increases to public servants who are among the best paid in Australia.

Well, yes, as long as “among the best paid” = “below the national average”.

From what we’ve seen so far, I think we can safely suggest that Tim is among the best economic minds in Australia.

Anyway – the article goes on and on. If you really want to punch yourself in the face and read the rest of it, you can continue it over here.

Unfortunately, this is indicative of the type of vacuous piffle we’re getting from the Newman government across a wide range of policy areas, where Ministers – too many Ministers – are still acting as if they’re in opposition and regularly producing all sorts of inaccurate and superficial  rubbish about the big policy issues that they are now supposed to own. They aren’t getting called on it either, as the Labor opposition are one of the saddest telephone booths of people you’ll ever lay eyes on, and the media is getting hollowed out to the point where there aren’t enough hours in a journo’s day to be across the detail involved on any particular policy issue. Too many in the Newman Ministry, including the alleged Treasurer, are effectively running a Baffle Them With Bullshit strategy.

The difference between being in government and being in Opposition is that the former requires you to be at least marginally acquainted with the reality based community. Unlike Opposition, government doesn’t start and end with political hackery – there is a more important job involved, that of policy and governance.

And that requires you to at least be partially across your brief.

God help them when the inevitable policy crisis lands in their lap, where the effectiveness of its management will be defined by their actual policy capabilities and policy knowledge. From what we’re seeing so far, there’s a lot of childish pretenders hanging around.

So…..

Dear Tim Nicholls, if you want to actually be the Treasurer, then start acting like it. Shit or get off the pot.

Disclaimer: When I take off my possum suit, I work for Qld’s public sector union – which may explain why I’m across the details involved here.  These views are my own  - however widely they may or may not happen to be shared by others.

But more importantly, just how representative are those voices in our national debate that so often claim to speak on our behalf – that so often claim to represent the views we supposedly believe in as a population?

What follows is a walk through the national mindset as we have collectively revealed it to be over the last 6 months in polling. Some of you will be rejoice over what turns up, others will be horrified – all of you will probably have a chuckle at some of the paradoxes involved  – yet whatever your perspective, it certainly helps explain some of the underlying dynamics of our national disgruntlement.  The 30 odd poll results here mention the pollster and the date the polls were taken at the bottom and all have sample sizes about 1000 for a margin of error around the 3% mark.

First up – what do we see as the role of government? (click to expand)

Adding some texture to this and focusing on some specific policy areas (click to expand):

As a country, we believe not only in an active government, but we also believe that our governments are doing too little in providing  the public services we demand. Health, public transport infrastructure, education – even holding banks and financial institutions to account (keep this in your thought orbit, as it will feed into some important themes later) – all show the public desire for more government action.

Yet this is where the first paradox occurs. What do we believe about the size of government?

Think about that for a minute. The largest response, a plurality of the population, believes that government is too large, yet clear majorities want government to do more on health, education, public transport and bank regulation – while a plurality wants the government to do more on crime protection and pollution regulation.

But let’s not stop there – if government is too large, do we believe that things like industry assistance for car manufacturing is part of the largesse problem?

Clearly not. Worth noting here is that this question didn’t ask  about current levels of assistance, but *additional* assistance. Support is not only strong, but bipartisan – with only Greens voters not reaching an outright majority for more government expenditure on car manufacturing.

But is this view of ours isolated to just assistance for car manufacturing, perhaps as some peculiar  cultural security blanket we’ve developed for Australian made motor vehicles?

Or course not! We support giving assistance to other manufacturing sectors at a higher rate than we do for the motor vehicle industry. What is also interesting to note is that while 55% of Coalition voters believed government is too large, 66% of them believe in what can only be described as high levels of industry support – and do so at a rate higher than ALP voters.

The “size of government” paradox in Australia is quite something – while we believe government is too large as some broad, abstract motherhood statement, we also want it to be that size or even larger whenever we focus on a specific issue. As we shall see later on, it just doesn’t stop at industry assistance or the usual list of public services, but covers a vast policy playing field.

So what then do we currently think of the economic reform program of the past 30 years – a program that reduced industry protection and the role of government in large areas of the economy? More to the point, *who* do we believe that reform program benefited?

Note the similarity between ALP and Coalition voters here – a bipartisan belief set.

With a clear majority of us believing that corporations received most of the benefit of the reform program, it’s worth looking at the support levels of individual reforms – they start to tell a story.

A majority believe that privatising Telstra was bad for Australia, a plurality believe that privatising Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank weren’t exactly crash hot ideas for the country either. GST, free trade agreements and floating the dollar – miscellaneous policy stuff – all received plurality support for being a good outcome, while compulsory superannuation and Medicare enjoy massive levels of community support.

What we start to see is that Australians like governments owning things and privatisation is still poisonous (as Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser found out in Qld). This also becomes apparent when we start talking about banks:

A clear majority of Australians would support establishing a government owned bank!

Yet, we also see enormous levels of support for bank regulation of various forms – from interest rates to salary caps to fee regulation, while even supporting a super profits tax on our banking sector.

So taking a recap, we support the idea of small government – but only as a broad motherhood statement since we can’t find any area we would actually like government to become smaller in. We believe that government isn’t doing enough on public services like health, education and public transport infrastructure. We support industry assistance, we support government owning things and oppose privatisation. We believe that the economic reform program didn’t benefit ordinary Australians and that most of the benefits went to corporations. We also believe that, at least so far as banks are concerned, we don’t appear to have much trust in those corporations and are more than willing to regulate their activities and behaviour far, far more than we currently do.

What amused me recently was how many folks were surprised at the results of a recent Essential Report question on “Class Warfare”.

A plurality of respondents sided with the government on this – which surprised people – including a majority of support among those earning less than $600 per week and a plurality of those earning more than $1600 per week.

But we also need to keep in mind that this question was framed in terms of a partisan contest between Government and Opposition. When one side of politics has a big lead over the other, what we find happens (not occasionally, but as a general rule) is that the side with the big leads gets a boost to the results of the side of the argument they are supporting.

Far from this result being a surprise, the results were highly likely to have been boosted for the Opposition. If you removed partisan identification in the question and asked it again, you would very likely have had a large, clear majority of support for the underlying proposition in the question – that of hitting the extremely wealthy and large corporations with taxes to ensure that all Australians get their cut of the benefits.

A good example of the prominence of this type of belief can be seen in the results of a question that asked about a how return to surplus should be paid for.

If you have to have a surplus, increasing taxes for large corporations and reducing tax breaks for wealthy individuals gained clear majorities of support – majorities across political cohorts.  It’s also interesting that the two ideas with the lowest levels of support were cutting welfare – to the unemployed and disabled gaining the least support, and middle class welfare getting the second lowest support rate.

Further on this theme of the way Australians perceive large corporations  – particularly in the banking and finance sectors – we had this question about what is often described as a Tobin Tax

Again, a clear majority of support for higher levels of taxation on this sector.

Yet it isn’t only the big guys on the block where Australians support more government  intervention and regulation – it’s a fairly broad canvas. To give an idea of the general zeitgeist involved here:

This poll result could also be called A Nightmare on Collins Street – home of the Institute of Public Affairs If it moves, we appear to be pretty happy to regulate it, often enthusiastically so.

One of the particular areas of regulation that gain a lot of attention in public debate is that of the labour market – particularly penalty rates of late.

Again we see robust bipartisan support levels for weekend penalty rates.  Just as we believed the benefits of our previous economic reform program went mostly to corporations, we also believe that the benefits of labour market flexibility have mostly gone to employers, rather than employees – but with a twist:

A clear majority believe that employers are getting the most benefit, including majorities across the voting spectrum. The twist? Part time workers – the very group falling largely into the casual work category – have the lowest level of belief that casualisation mostly benefits employers.

On the question of whether employers should be required to provide more permanent jobs:

Here we still get a plurality of support, with Coalition voters the only major cohort opposed to such regulation.

So taking another recap – we support the idea of small government, but only as a broad motherhood statement since we can’t find any area we would actually like government to become smaller in. We believe that government isn’t doing enough on public services like health, education and public transport infrastructure. We support industry assistance, we support government owning things and oppose privatisation. We believe that the economic reform program didn’t benefit ordinary Australians and that most of the benefits went to corporations. We don’t appear to have much trust in those corporations and are more than willing to regulate their activities at a higher level than we currently do, including increasing their tax burden. We also believe that labour market flexibility has mostly benefited employers and that those employers should be required to provide more permanent jobs.

The story is starting to build – so what about foreign investment, particularly the types of foreign investment that will become increasingly important issues in Australia?

Australians have never been particularly fond of the idea of foreign investment and this year’s Lowy Poll asked a question that encapsulated this bugbear of ours with another – who owns our farm land.

The collision was quite something:

Not only were 81% of us opposed to our government allowing foreign companies to buy our farmland, 63% of us reacted strongly against it.

Increasingly, the source country for such investment in our agriculture is China – so what are our perceptions of Chinese investment?

A clear majority of Australians believe that our government is allowing too much investment from China. When explored further and those 56% were asked an additional set of questions, this is what we got:(click to expand)

You could write an entire thesis from those results. But it’s pretty consistent with the world view we have about our economy and the role of government generally. If we don’t particularly like or trust large domestic corporations such as the banks, big foreign controlled ones are on a hiding to nothing.

So keeping all that in mind – the broad picture of what we believe about the government and what role we believe the government should play in our economy – let’s turn now to our current views about the economy and our expectations of it over the next 12 months. These were taken in the few  weeks before the latest national accounts figures were released.

Even though we are pessimistic, a plurality of us are satisfied with our current financial situation – almost a mirror image of the above result:

When asked about the state of the economy *compared* to other countries – we acknowledge that Australia is doing comparatively well

Yet when asked simply about the state of the Australian economy in an absolute sense– with no reference to other countries – we get a very different result:

Only around half as many people that believe we are doing well *comparatively*, believe we are doing well *absolutely*.

But if we change the question again, use international comparisons as context and add information about our unemployment rate, inflation rate and interest rates – the recognition level of the state of the Australian economy being “good” lifts substantially.

It’s almost as if there’s a substantial proportion of us that know the economy is good, but don’t really want to admit it unless we almost have to – which brings us to a funny little poll question worth mentioning on interest rates.

Only  35% of the country believe  the correct answer – despite interest rates being the largest and most consistent economic talking point in the media cycle – and where not a single political cohort could reach a majority on that correct answer.

Finally, keeping in mind our general pessimism and our views on government assistance to industry – what are our views on government assistance towards each other? We already know that cutting unemployment benefits/disability support payments and middle class welfare were the two least supported options when it came to funding a return to surplus.

Firstly, we believe in means testing – at least as a motherhood statement roughly equivalent in vigour to our belief in small government:

Over two thirds of us believe in means testing government subsidies with clear majorities across all political cohorts. But moving beyond the general ideal – what do we believe about a particular subsidy, like, say, the private health insurance rebate?

Quite the collapse. Also worth noting is the result by income.

Similar to the way we support the idea of small government until it comes to finding some piece of government we actually believe should be smaller  – we support the idea of means testing subsidies until the point comes where we are actually getting means tested on something.

Of course, this subsidy issue – being a partisan divide – has an appropriately large gap on the differences:

Not that hypocrisy has a partisan lean – keep in mind that if the political roles were reversed, so too would be the results.

What comes out from this broad snapshot is that what Australians believe about the role of government in our society and economy isn’t necessarily what our institutions believe or practice, and probably hasn’t been for a while. Our beliefs as a country are certainly far removed from many participants in the national debate that pretend to speak on behalf of our population and on behalf of our interests.

Whatever the faults, foibles or otherwise of these national beliefs – and this isn’t an exercise in either support of, or opposition to them – our national debates on the role of government in our society and economy are becoming increasingly isolated from what the majority of the country actually believes.

Our public debates assume that the benefits of privatisation have reached a conclusion – the public believes that privatisation was and is a catastrophe and that government should own a larger sector of the economy because we trust government more than large private sector corporations.

Our public debates assume that smaller government and less regulation is universally beneficial – the public supports substantially higher levels of regulation on just about any topic you care to name and struggles to find something they’d like the government to become smaller in.

Our public debates assume that economic reform has been such an obviously beneficial thing to ordinary Australians that it no longer needs explaining – the public believes that corporations took all benefits of that reform, leaving  them with little more than a casualised workforce and reduced job security.

If we keep having our national debates like this – excluding  larger and larger sections of our population and ignoring what they believe – they won’t be national debates, we’ll just be talking among ourselves generating ever increasing quantities of public opprobrium, contempt and general unhinging. If you haven’t noticed – this is where we are at right now.

Our national debates need more participants and institutions talking with and to the public, acknowledging what they believe, explaining the increasing complexity of the world and bringing the population along with them in the debate through persuasion. What we have now – a political system struggling to be heard calmly, institutions talking among themselves and a bunch of vested interests shouting and threatening everything that moves – let alone a media unsure of how to be a constructive participant anymore – it will only end in grief.

As a country we have an unparalleled opportunity right in front of us – not only in deciding the type of society we want to be, but having the capacity to generate the wealth we need to solve any and all of our problems. It would be a tragedy if we fucked this up because some of us refused to acknowledge how important it actually is to bring the public along with us.

First up, the two party preferred results:

Over the last 3 months or so we’ve witnessed a gradual decline in Labor’s two party preferred, with that 4 month strong flatlining of 46/54 to the Coalition finally coming to an end in the last week of February. Between March and mid May the ALP experienced a 3 point fade in the two party preferred vote – running at about a 1 point loss a month – followed by a slight one point recovery over the last 3 weeks or so.

Of course, that’s not nearly as exciting as some have put it in our absence – so if you prefer your polls with a little more histrionics and generous dollops of SHOUTY farce, let’s have a quick recap (click to expand)

Ahem – quite.

On the primary vote front, the Coalition picked up nearly 3 points between March and mid May, going from around 46 at the beginning of March, up to a touch under 49 in mid May – before pulling slightly back over the last few weeks to be sitting on 48.5.

The story for the ALP primary has been a little heavier, with the primary vote sliding from 33 at the end of February down to 29 in mid May, before recovering to around 30.5 over the last few weeks.

Meanwhile, the Greens vote appears to be following some strange 5 month cosmic cycle from peak to trough, picking up a point over the last few months to be sitting on 12.

The actual trend point estimates as of today come in like this:

Also worth mentioning is that broad menagerie commonly known as “Others” are currently rounding up the difference at 9.1%, which is a 2.4% swing towards that group since the 2010 election.

So that’s where we all sit at the moment on the political polling spectrum – the ALP chewing on various flavors of disaster, the Coalition alternating between landslide and wipe out, while the Greens are doing whatever peculiar thing it is that they do to get their supporters behaving like a sine wave.

Pollytics is now back on line – I’ll be posting at least a few times a week and we have an awful lot to talk about. As a primer, I wrote a big update to The Great Unhinging for the June Edition of The Kings Tribune – they’ve thoughtfully let it escape the treeware and have posted it online. It’s worth a squiz, not only because of the underlying social and political dynamics it explores – dynamics that are driving the place and have been for a few years now (which is why the unhinging was so predictable), but it also sets the groundwork for a number of articles that will be appearing here over the next little while. So go and have a read folks.

If you enjoy that Unhinging Revisited piece, also try and grab a copy of Laura Tingles Quarterly Essay “Great Expectations” that’s currently in news agents. It covers many of the same issues associated with the unhinging, but does so over a longer time frame with a much broader context. It’s a ripper.

And welcome back.

First up, the two party preferred trend might surprise a few folks that take their media polling commentary too seriously – it reminds me of a line from Chicken Run, “the polling flashed before my eyes, and it was really boring”.

Over the 3 months from mid November, nothing has changed at all in the two party preferred status – zip, zilch, nadda. Federal politics has been glued to a 54/46 split for nearly 90 days straight.

The primary votes however are a little more interesting, with some compositional change occurring underneath that rather dull looking straight line.

While the Labor primary continues to recover from its July tanking – albeit at a pace not dissimilar to continental drift over the last few months – Coalition primary support fell to 46% at the end of last year, before bouncing back slightly post Christmas. It’s interesting to ponder whether that is an effective Coalition vote floor under the prevailing dynamics.

Meanwhile, the Greens continued their year long voyage of exploring political life between 11 and 12% public support and the broad “Others”  - apart from pollsters having considerable variation in their vote estimates for this rag tag group – appeared to show a continuation of the slow fade that started after their June 2011 highs.

As of last weekend, the actual point estimates of the trends and the changes from the last election look like this:

The government has a 5.4% swing away from them on the primary vote, washing out to a slightly smaller 4.3% swing away from them on the two party preferred. The Coalition has picked up 3.1 points on their primary while the Greens have lost 0.4 points. The broad “Others” have picked up 2.7 since the 2010 election.

Moving on now to December quarter’s election simulation. For those not familiar with it, we grab three months worth of polling from the major pollsters and a few bits of unpublished stuff (usually giving us a pooled sample of around the 13 to 15 thousand mark), break it down by geography (by state first and foremost, but also by region when possible), turn the derived swings from those polling results into probability distributions for each seat (taking account of their sub-state geography)  –then test those swings against the current seat margins about a million times with a monte carlo simulation and aggregate the results. We end up with a simulated election that shows us how many seats would have changed were an election held during that period and the results of the election closely resembled the polling.

First up, the state based swings the government found themselves facing in the December quarter:

The Coalition was experiencing a two party preferred swing towards them in all states and territories, and in both capital cities and regional areas. Seeing how that plays out in seat terms with our simulation, we get:

During the December quarter, the polling had the government facing an election outcome of 53 seats in the 150 seat House of Representatives. Zooming in to the tasty bit:

The ALP had a 65% implied probability of winning at least 52 seats, dropping down to 53.1% for winning 53 seats (the most likely outcome) before dropping further to a 42% implied probability of winning at least 54 seats.

While that is pretty dismal for the government by just about any yardstick – it was actually a significant improvement over the September quarter results. It’s worth comparing the two (you’ll have to click to expand this one):

In the September quarter simulation, the government was looking at only 43 seats, while the December quarter showed a 10 seat improvement across the probability spectrum for Labor. We can see where the improvement came from by looking at how the State breakdowns changed over the period.

While the two party preferred only increased by 2.1% nationally for the ALP, they made 3.1% gains in Qld, 3.7% gains in regional Australia and 5.2% gains in South Australia. On the other hand, Victoria was flat and the capital cities only moved by 1.2% over the September quarter to December quarter period.

Worth mentioning is that the ALP is currently sitting 1.1% higher on the two party preferred than they experienced in the December quarter (currently 45.8% as opposed to the 44.7% achieved over the October to December period) – mostly because of the relatively poor October results. So the current trend polling would have them somewhere around 5 or 6 seats better off at the moment than they were during the final 3 months of last year.

But the story at the moment is not so much the relatively poor state of Labor’s electoral prospects based on current polling, but the fact that the two party preferred trend line has been unmoved for around 90 days. I can’t find another example of 90 days of nothing in federal polling going back to the mid 1980’s, even over a Christmas break. Usually you get some movement – a bit here, a bit there. This one – flat as a tack.

Now stop laughing for a moment if you can!

There’s something about that phrase that just doesn’t sit right with us. We’re not only unaccustomed to thinking about ourselves that way, but for many it’s a concept that is one part distasteful to three parts utterly ridiculous – try mentioning it in polite company sometime. Bring a helmet.

We’ll often laugh at the cognitive dissonance displayed by our American cousins when they start banging on about American Exceptionalism – waxing lyrical about  the assumed ascendancy of their national exploits while they’re forced to take out a second mortgage to pay for a run of the mill medical procedure. That talk of exceptionalism has become little more than an exceptional disregard for the truth of their own comparative circumstances.

But in truth, we both share that common ignorance  – we share a common state of denial about the hard realities of our own accomplishments compared to those of the rest of the world. While the Americans so often manifest it as a belief that they and they alone are the global benchmark for all human achievement,  we simply refuse to acknowledge our own affluence and privilege – denialists of own hard won triumphs, often hysterically so.

Never before has there been a nation so completely oblivious to not just their own successes, but the sheer enormity of them, than Australia today.

In some respects, we have a long standing cultural disposition towards playing down any national accomplishment not achieved on a sporting field – one of the more bizarre national psychopathologies in the global pantheon of odd cultural behaviours – but to such an extreme have we taken this, we are no longer capable of seeing an honest reflection of ourselves in the mirror.

We see instead a distorted, self absorbed cliché of ourselves bordering on parody – struggling victims of tough social and economic circumstances that are not just entirely fictional, but comically separated from the reality of the world around us.

So preoccupied have we become with our own imagined hardships, so oblivious are we to the reality of our privileged circumstances, that when households earning  over $150,000 a year complain about having government welfare payments scaled back, many of us treat it as a legitimate grievance.

Somewhere along the highway to prosperity – and an eight lane highway it has been – far too many of us somehow managed to confuse Cost Of Lifestyle with Cost Of Living. We managed to confuse government assistance as a means to enable the less well off to achieve a better standard of living and greater opportunity, with government assistance being a god given right to fund the self indulgences of an aspirational lifestyle choice beyond our income means. Too many of us have demanded our dreams be handed to us on a plate, and if our income couldn’t provide for them, we demanded that government should give us handouts to make up the difference.

So let us take a hard look at our economic reality.

Over the medium term, our broader economic performance has been nothing short of astonishing. Before the resources boom was even a twinkle in the eye of Chinese poverty alleviation, our performance was world beating – that is worth keeping in your thought orbit. Big Dirt has a bad habit of propagandising about their own contributions and the Australian public has a bad habit of believing them when it comes to our own national development of late.

Imagine if, in 1985, all OECD economies had exactly 100 units of GDP each. If we then tracked the growth of that GDP (using OECD data) over time with the actual growth rates achieved during that period (creating a basic index) – this is how economies changed (click to expand the charts)

Only Turkey, Israel, Ireland and Korea have experienced more growth – with Turkey and Korea pursuing the change from developing to developed status, Israel partially so as well and Ireland recovering from the economic lethargy of civil war, we are the highest growing country that can be remotely called a developed country with no unusual circumstances. Putting this into context, let’s trace that growth over the last 25 odd years with some of the countries we are often compared to.

It’s kind of mind blowing – we grew faster, significantly faster, than all of the countries we are usually compared to, including over the period before the resources boom. But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

“What about the distribution of that growth”, I hear you ask. “The poor missed out” you might also be tempted to add.

Using data from the freshly minted OECD report on international comparisons of income distribution and inequality, where the average income growth per year was measured among countries between the mid 1980’s and the late 2000’s, what we find is that Australia left just about everyone else for dead. Not just at the average, or total household income level, but also with the size of the income growth among the poorest  10% of our households *and* the richest 10% of our households.

First up, total population income growth in blue, bottom decile income growth (the poorest 10% of households) in red and the top decile income growth (the wealthiest 10%) in green for all OECD countries.

 It’s interesting to note that the only countries where the poorest  10% of households experienced faster income growth than Australia was 4 of the five PIIGS countries – the current basket cases of Europe. Something might be said there about false growth and swings and roundabouts.

Looking at how our growth here compared to the usual suspects:

And for direct comparison:

It is true that the income of the wealthiest 10% of households in Australia grew faster than the income of the poorest 10% of households – the income of Australia’s wealthiest 10% of households grew faster than any other cohort in the OECD. But it’s also true that our poorest 10% of households experienced faster income growth than any country other than Spain and Ireland (who are now quickly reversing that growth with their economic woes) , and faster income growth than the top 10% of wealthiest households in *every other country*.

The income of our poor grew faster than the income of everyone else’s rich. Just chew on that reality for a bit. Let it roll around in your head.

While you’re chewing on that, let’s take a quick squiz at minimum wages. Again, using OECD data, if we turn hourly minimum wages into US dollar equivalents using purchasing power parity adjustments (so we can compare like with like), we can see how the real hourly minimum wage has operated in Australia compared to the nations we’re usually put in the same bucket with.

We have the highest minimum wages in the OECD.  Worth noting too that despite the incessant whinging from the usual business lobbies in Australia, it hasn’t done our economic activity any harm. Now if we compare the ratio of these minimum wages to the average wage for each country, giving us a simple glance at the distribution of wages for each country (which the OECD also fortuitously provides, saving us time), what we find is that Australia, again, sits on top.

Our minimum wage is a lot closer to our average wage than comparable nations.

So our economy has grown faster than nearly all others, our household income has grown faster than nearly all others (including our poor having income growth higher than everyone else’s rich) and we have the highest minimum wages in the world. But wait, there’s more!

“It’s unsustainable” I hear the skeptics say – “it’s fuelled by debt!”

Well, let’s have a quick look at government debt as a percentage of GDP. Here’s all OECD countries – I’ve thoughtfully pointed out Australia in the chart because it’s easy to miss:

And again, let’s look at the comparison with the usual suspects over time:

OK – So our economy has grown faster than nearly all others (certainly faster than all developed countries), our household income has grown faster than nearly all others (including our poor having income growth higher than everyone else’s rich), we have the highest minimum wages in the world and the third lowest debt in the OECD.

But “what about the taxes” I hear the skeptics say. “We have great big new taxes on everything!”

Well let’s have a look at tax as a percentage of GDP for OECD nations: And again, let’s look at the comparison with the usual suspects over time:

We are pretty much the definition of a low tax country.

So our economy has grown faster than nearly all others (certainly faster than all developed countries), our household income has grown faster than nearly all others (including our poor having income growth higher than everyone else’s rich), we have the highest minimum wages in the world, the third lowest debt and the 6^th lowest taxes in the OECD.

Now let’s talk about wealth – not income, which we’ve mostly looked at so far, but wealth – the value of our accumulated assets – housing, super, savings etc etc. Here, we’re going to use the The Credit Suisse 2011 Global Wealth Report.

Not only did this find that Australia has the second highest average wealth in the world at $397,000 US dollars per adult (with Switzerland ranked first), but we have the highest median wealth in the world – the wealth of the middleth adult in Australia – coming in at $222,000 US dollars.

The report also gives a number of stats among selected countries which is worth taking a good, long look at.

First up, mean and median wealth per adult:

Next up, GDP per adult in US dollars:

Getting the picture?

Now let’s look at the proportion of the adult population worth over $100,000 US dollars:

Finally from Credit Suisse, for some real global context, let’s look at the proportion of the adult population that is in the top 10% of *ALL* global wealth holders.

A full 75.5% of all Australian adults are in the world’s wealthiest 10% of total population.

And to throw a cherry on top in terms of just how our enormous economic growth, income growth and wealth accumulation has flowed through to our human development in a low taxing, low debt country – here’s the latest United Nations Human Development Index for the usual suspects:

We’re second, behind Norway, who knocked us off from our number 1 spot at the beginning of the 21^st Century.

So this is our economic reality – we are the wealthiest nation in the world with 75.5% of our adult population making it into the global top 10%, our economy has grown faster than nearly all others (certainly faster than all other developed countries), our household income growth has been one of the fastest in the world (including our poor having income growth larger than everyone else’s rich!), we have the highest minimum wages in the world, the third lowest debt and the 6^th lowest taxes in the OECD and are ranked 2^nd on the United Nations Human Development Index.

And this didn’t happen by accident.

This happened by design.

This happened because of 30 years of hard, tedious, extraordinarily difficult policy work that far, far too many of us now either take completely for granted, or have simply forgotten about.  We have, without  even realising it, created the most successful and unique economic and policy arrangement of the late 20^th and early 21^st century – the proof is in the pudding. A low tax nation with high quality, public funded institutions. A low debt nation with world leading human development and infrastructure. The wealthiest nation in the world where even though our rich get richer, our poor have income growth so extraordinary that it increases at a faster rate than the rich expect to experience anywhere else in the world but Australia. A nation where we enjoy the highest minimum wages in the world.

But so many of us simply deny it – the conservatives deny it because it’s more convenient to whip up hysteria about their political enemies. Filling the heads of Australians with complete lies for partisan advantage and not giving a pinch of the proverbial about the human damage that would be wrought if they ever succeeded in getting us to talk ourselves into a recession of our own making . That’s not to mention many of their ideologues – denial is an absolute must when any acknowledgement of our actual economic and social reality would be to admit that their extreme policy fetishes are just pissing in the wind.

The broad left in Australia deny it, because to admit our economic and social reality is to admit that we’ve actually solved most of the big problems that other nations are still grappling with, and they had little to do with it. The problems we have left in Australia are difficult and sophisticated, requiring  a level of thoughtful engagement far beyond the scope of occupying Fuck Knows Where in tents. If the US government responded to the Occupy Wall Street movement by implementing a large policy program that Australia already has – Occupy Wall Street would declare victory and go to the pub!

Then we have the ordinary Australian – who appears to be getting more ordinary with every passing day.

It might be time that Australia grew its reality based community – perhaps acknowledging maybe not Australian Exceptionalism, but certainly our exceptional results and what has actually caused them.  Maybe a little pride in our achievements, a recognition of our triumphs, a grasp of where we indeed sit in a global context – if for no other reason than to crystalise out exactly what it is that we need to solve next, free from the noise of the drum bangers and their oxygen thieving ways when it comes to what passes for our national public debate.

Maybe just a little less unhinging.