Day 8 report
Before reviewing yesterday’s happenings, let’s start with the latest Newspoll from the weekend, based on an expanded survey of more than 1700 voters. Newspoll’s headline prediction was a national two-party preferred vote share of 58 per cent for Labor and 42 per cent for the Coalition. That is a two point improvement for Labor on the previous Newspoll, and a two point decline for the Coalition. The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan is here. (You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graph).
Last week the movement to the Coalition in the ACNielsen and Galaxy polls gave rise to the possibility of a Coalition recovery. For many, I suspect today’s poll would cast some doubt on that prospect. Simon Jackman argued that the difference between the earlier polls and today’s Newspoll was Labor’s matching of the Coalition tax plan.
Bottom line: public opinion on Friday-Sunday (when both tax proposals were before the voters), was more friendly to Labor than it was Monday-Wednesday, when the Coalition’s tax announcement had yet to draw a response from Labor. Having scored the week as a win for the Coalition, I’d have to revise that to a draw in light of the Newspoll numbers. And the kicker is that the Newspoll numbers are pre-debate.
Yesterday, saw three new policies on the Coalition’s website: from Sunday was the Climate Change fund, and announced yesterday were a dental workforce for Northern Australia and better cancer care and support for women.
Over at the Labor website, we have the first two official election policies: a work and family policy document and an affordable childcare policy document.
If you don’t have high speed broadband, you may not be able to read the Coalition’s policy documents from home as three of the five policy statements on its website are some 2.5 megabytes in length. At around 362 and 154 kilobytes in length, Labor’s policy documents are around 10 percent the size of the Coalition’s policy documents. I am intrigued by the Coalition’s strategy of having high quality cover page images in their policy documents but at the cost of making the documents less accessible over the Internet to mum and dad voters. The Coalition took a similar approach to the size of electronic policy documents in the 2004 election.
Andrew Norton noted that the worm was stratospheric when Kevin Rudd claimed that people are feeling worse off due to rising costs. Norton explored whether this is a case of the objective statistics not capturing the subjective experience of the Australian electorate. He concluded, “Whatever Kevin Rudd says, whatever the worm says, these are good times. The typical family may want more, but they are not worse off than before.” Norton’s discussion reminded me of the effectiveness with which John Howard used the phase “five minutes of economic sunshine” to combat Keating in the 1996 election. It also reminded me of the maxim: perception is reality.