[csaa-forum] Re: wanting to be effluent

[s.mckiernan at ecu.edu.au]

Jon remember that PHON vote was largely made up of disaffected ALP / Lib
voters looking for some form of third way, the concern for Labor is they did
not return in their implosion.  Working class conservative voters have imho
gone looking for solidity, and as much as it hurts me to say this, the
forests policy revelations of the last week of the campaign reveal the
assumptions of the parties and the preeminent position John Howard has
cultivated.

Though I don¹t want to overemphasise the role of forest policy, I think it
highlights the difficulty Labor had in breaking through the torrent of cash
being offered by two sides of politics. Labor chased a progressive mainland
policy on forests that marginalised urban labor voters at the expense of
threatened jobs in Tasmania, John Howard played the same game but by half,
presented a smaller target and the offer of less disruption.  The
paradoxical nature of these policies coming so soon after discussion of the
USFTA is astounding.  Many industries will be going through major
restructure over the next decade as a result of the captive Senate and the
adoption of the fta.

In WA the Libs copped a 9.52% swing in the Senate, Green 7.69% and Labor
­1.1% 
The Democrats vote collapsed everywhere according to the AEC website.

Standing on a polling booth from 0700 to scrutineering until 2030 afterwards
I was struck by how my preconceptions of the political process were upset
and in some cases reaffirmed.
1. Golf course estates in the northern suburb sprawl of Perth are remarkably
treeless, and so are the number of Greens voters, not many votes in a forest
package when your McMansion is sitting where tuart forest and banksia
woodland once was.
2. Those that did vote Green sent their preferences 50 / 50 ALP /Lib.  No
clear direction of preferences on their HTVs.
3. Only two political parties bothered to have the booth staffed (was a
small booth of ~1700 expected electors), the Greens staffer showed up at
0830 dropped the HTV¹s and left.  One Nation set up a nice converted orange
crate with streamers and left, which is a nice political analogy, as the
crate was still there when I left the booth, obviously lost the keys/road
map/impetus to retrieve said object, the piccie of Pauline did look perverse
when photocopied onto yellow (peril) paper.
Steven McKiernan
PhD Candidate
ECU






On 14/10/04 11:55 AM, "Jon Stratton" <J.Stratton at curtin.edu.au> wrote:

>    Hi Everybody,
>            While I am finding the general discussion of what happened in the
> election fascinating and I, too, feel pretty upset, many people are writing as
> if the Labor vote collapsed.  It didn't.  If you look at the ABC News website
> where they have the total polling figures what you will see is that the Labor
> vote actually increased by 0.3 per cent to 38.2 per cent of the total vote.
> What has happened is that One Nation's vote collapsed and so did the Democrats
> vote.  One Nation's vote is down 3.2 per cent and the Democrats down 4.2 per
> cent.  The Greens vote is up 2 per cent.  The Liberal vote is up 3.4 per cent.
> Thus, imho, what seems to have happened is that the One Nation votes went to
> the Libs as did some of the Democrat vote, the Greens picked up some of the
> Dems vote as well.  The remainder of the votes seem to have gone to 'Other
> Parties' which most probably means the Family First party mostly.  Probably
> this is where those far right voters have gone after One Nation's implosion.
> Thus, what appears to have been most destructive for Labor in the election was
> the realighnment of the conservative vote, concentrating it in two major
> parties--the Nats vote was up .3 per cent.  I also suspect that the Greens
> preferences didn't flow solidly towards Labor.
>     If the above analysis is correct the problem for Labor is not the collapse
> of its vote but Labor's inability to increase its vote.  Now, what the above
> also suggests is that all those 'swinging voters'  (how '70s) were actually
> One Nation and Dem voters looking for somewhere else to go.  From this base
> point the question for Labor becomes how to attract more conservative
> voters--in a country that has a strong conservative history and where, up
> until Latham, Labor had been increasingly prepared to sell out its status as
> the major party of moral standing in order to compete pragmatically for the
> votes of an increasingly self-interested population, something that has been
> well-pointed out (though not this bluntly) by a number of postrings.
> cheers,
> Jon    
> 
>  
> 


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