Oz Politics Blog

The average probability from the five bookies for a Coalition government following the 2007 election is 46.6 per cent. It was 47.1 per cent on Monday last week.

The other graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.

Go for it …

I am considering whther to introduce a comment rating system that would inform comment auto-moderation and daily comment limits.

My proposal is that any reader would be able to rate a comment between 1 and 5, on a categorical scale from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. These ratings (and the number of raters) would be displayed beside each comment. I have uploaded a very clunky version of the rating system — as a proof on concept. I will work on a more beautiful rating system over the weekend.

Once posters had received ten or more ratings across their comments, an average rating would also appear beside their name.

Auto-moderation

The proposed system would ‘auto-moderate’ any comment with ten or more ratings, and an average rating less than 1.5. Auto-moderated comments would not be visible - nor would further ratings on the comment be possible. The tribe has spoken.

Daily comment limits

I want to reward the better rated commentators with the capacity to post more comments. My proposal is to set a variable daily comment limits based on the average rating of each author. It could be something like that set out in the next table.

Safeguards

The system would not allow people to rate their own comments. They would not be able to rate a comment more than once. And they would not be able to rate older comments, (say) those older than seven days.

People who advocate grotting an individual with a series of low ratings will have their effective score set to zero, and as a consequence a limit of two comments a day.

Feedback

Anyway, it is just a proposal at the moment. Comments on the proposal and other suggestions welcome.

Update - 15 April 2007

Okay. So the auto-moderation idea was crap.

I have taken down the comment rating plugin. It was generating a bimodal distribution around 1 (poor) and 5 (excellent). While this distribution confirmed the disagreeable nature of politics, it was not particularly useful for assessing the quality of comments. It was an interesting experiment.

I have also taken down the current one-size-fits-all daily comment limit. I am working on a new yellow card system. Once a yellow card has been issued it heralds daily comment limits for the author of the yellow carded comment for the next 7 days. Three yellow cards and then a red card, with no capacity to comment for 7 days. I am working with comment limits of 8, 4 and 2 for the yellow cards. A second or third yellow card is only deemed to have been issued if a yellow card is currently in force.

Andrew Norton noted on his blog that the Parliamentary Library has published a new monograph by Maurice Rickard called Principle and Pragmatism: A study of competition between Australia’s major parties at the 2004 election and other recent federal elections.

Andrew’s key observation:

The chart that most interested me (on p.68, for those who download the publication) was the division of issues into economic and non-economic. This shows that since 1998 the Liberals have moved to the right on economic issues and to the left on non-economic issues. Their campaign rhetoric is consistent with strong spending increases on health and education, and the overall philosophy of ‘big government conservatism’, with growth-oriented economic policies used to finance a large welfare state.

As I have argued before, the big question is how viable this is as a long-term political strategy. Despite the Liberals’ rhetorical and policy shifts on non-economic issues, public opinion still favours Labor on these matters. And that’s with the benefit of being in government and actually implementing big-spending policies. If the Coalition loses the 2007 poll, will voters believe Opposition promises, or fall back on long-standing stereotypes of the political parties? The danger, as has happened in the states, is that the Liberals will just look like a less sincere and less competent version of Labor.

With the final counts from the NSW election, I have closed off the election tipping competition. Congratulations to:

• Arbie Jay, Pedant, Sacha Blumen, EuRo, Copperhead and Aussie King Pin — for guessing Labor with 52 seats in the Legislative Assembly
• andaus, Liverpudlian, Teejay, Sacha Blumen and Deng Xiaoping — for guessing Labor with 9, Coalition with 8, Greens with 2, Christian Democrats 1 and Shooters Party 1 in the Legislative Council
• FredKnerk and Relaxed — in the individual seats tipping competition for guessing a high score of nine out of ten seats

Overall, I would say the winner was Sacha Blumen. Sacha was the only person to top two competitions. I clearly had too much of a Labor bias in my tips.

Peter Brent of Mumble had a bloody good piece in today’s Crikey, exploring why upstart pollster Galaxy is outperforming the established old guard. Unfortunately, it was in Crikey’s sealed section. Hopefully it will appear soon on Mumble.

The other Crikey story of note, was speculation that Amanda Vanstone is about to resign from the Senate so that she can be appointed Ambassador to Italy. There is also speculation that should Rudd win government he has promised Beazley an ambassadorship in Washington.

In the comments, RayTec reflects on how would Labor govern if it wins the next election, given it will face a hostile Senate for the first seven months, and possibly for its entire first term. Things could get ugly.