One of the problems with weekly political commentary columns is when there is a tendency to fall into the trap of debating who won the week. It’s a rather idiotic and terribly insular way of looking at politics. People going about their day-to-day lives don’t give much of a stuff about politics – indeed, they go out of their way to avoid it.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s when there was little choice about what you could watch, politicians were regularly interviewed on commercial TV current affairs programs. Then once a range of choices through different channels became available and the ratings were able to be done digitally rather than via a diary, it became quickly obvious that as soon as a politician came on the screen, the channel was changed.
Yet reading some commentary and weekly summaries you would be forgiven for believing people are so engaged in the events in Question Time that it actually matters whether Abbott’s back bench was smiling during an answer he gave.
Of course, such commentary is generally couched in terms of “while Question Time is not important in a broader sense, it is vital for conveying confidence among the parliamentary party”. At this point as well one might even quote Paul Keating in 1991 saying that “You can’t win in the electorate unless you’re winning in parliament. That is the golden rule of politics.”
Such a rule worked well for Keating because his strength was in parliament and he wished to convince people that it was important. It also works for journalists covering the shenanigans in Question Time because it makes them think it must be important.
But as Laurie Oakes observed when Keating made the statement, “the golden rule no longer applies”. And yet we try to pretend it does.
The symptom is magnified when it comes to polls.
When you need to write about who won or lost the week, using a poll helps no end. Suddenly, you no longer have just your opinion but you have scientific numbers to back you up!
Australian media relies far too greatly on polls. We don’t actually have many polls – we have just enough for them to be able to seem to matter. In the USA the proliferation of polling – including the daily updated Gallup Presidential Approval Poll – is such that a poll result itself is rarely the stuff of a headline news story.
In Australia with polls that come out either once a week or once a fortnight there is just enough for media outlets – who pay large amounts for such polling - to justify running them on their front page.
But the analysis is often really just about justifying one’s perception of who won the previous week or fortnight. This generally involves suggesting that an inherently variable statistic in which week to week or fortnight to fortnight jumps can be as much about the survey sample as it is about reflecting events or voters’ perceptions of events is somehow a mathematically accurate representation of reality.
Such analysis (or, if we are honest, storytelling) is bad enough, but when a change in the poll can be thought to determine events the entire game becomes woefully screwed.
Thus a good poll two weeks ago meant Tony Abbott was secure for now – a bad Newspoll this week means the heat is back on, a good or bad one next week will mean ... something.
Focus on the polls invariably means less focus on policy, which is always foolish because policy is what matters, policy actual drives polls, policy wins you elections.
Caring about polls and worrying about whether you’re winning or losing the week often leads to political parties which are behind in the polls to suggest they’re really doing a good job – they’re just not selling their message. It was the line used by the Howard government in 2007, the Rudd and Gillard governments throughout their time when they were behind in the polls, and now too we see the Abbott government pursuing such a line.
This week Malcolm Turnbull suggested the problem with the budget was the government “did not do a good enough job in explaining the scale of the fiscal problem the nation faces, and the urgency of taking corrective action.”
Or perhaps what happened is voters saw through the spin, or possibly that they agreed there was a need for something to be done to take “corrective action” but it thought the way the government proposed doing so was wrong.
Rare is the occasion that a good policy dies because of poor salesmanship. Much more common is a poor policy cannot be sold.
This week for example the Abbott government announced via a leak to The Adelaide Advertiser that it had abandoned its plan to cut $900m in support for the automotive industry.
But by the time the Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, gave his press conference to announce the change in policy it was clear $900m wasn’t going to the industry- the figure was closer to $100m. The government was abandoning the cuts, because they discovered the funding wouldn’t be spent anyway because the car industry was packing up.
So it was a policy change that was not some much about doing something, but looking like something was being done. And worst of all it was a policy approach that went counter to the general thrust of the government’s economic message that times were tough and the government needs to tighten its belt.
It was the type of announcement governments make when they are more concerned about winning the week than actually developing cogent policies.
It is not a good arbiter of what is to come in the May budget, and more than any of the changes in polls, it is a sign that this government continues to struggle.
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