Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Do the polls ad up?

In the last week of parliament before the winter recess election speculation moved from being unhealthily obsessive to becoming positively deranged.

The hysteria reached its peak with the release of two opinion polls on Monday and Tuesday. The first, the Nielsen poll in the Fairfax papers, found that although the coalition had crept marginally ahead (that is, by less than a statistical error) in the primary vote, the bottom line - the two party preferred vote - had Labor in front by 52 to 48. The politicians and pundits went into overdrive: John Howard commented that his party had gone up by four and theirs had gone down by one. Commentators whiffled with anticipation: an August 7 election was now a rolled gold certainty. Put down the glasses and collect round the back.

Next day Newspoll in the Murdoch press found that the parties were still dead level on primaries but that on the two party preferred, Labor led 52 to 48 - precisely the same figure as Nielsen. The commentators, aghast, shook their heads: clearly the election was now off again. The previous Newspoll had the government in front; now it was on the skids. Howard had nothing to say.

In other words, two identical results produced two totally contradictory predictions. So much for the finely honed science of psephology.

At least some of the confusion could have been avoided if the seers had bothered to note one of Howard's few clear statements on polling, which was that the coalition needed to be three clear points in front on the primary vote to ensure a win. This, as the figures above show, is merely simple arithmetic: minor party preferences, principally from the Greens, will boost Labor by around two percent when the final count comes in.

Speculation has now switched to September 4; after all, you can't have a press gallery without early election talk. But Howard may still need longer to turn a close race into a sure thing, if indeed he can do so at all.

A lot will depend on what sort of a bang the government gets for its megabucks, both in the handouts that are now starting to flow and in the incredible amount of political advertising the taxpayers are underwriting. Howard and his fellow raiders of the treasury pretend that this is no different from what happened under Labor, but this is as misleading as the advertisements themselves.

Under Howard there has been a leap of Olympic proportions. In the months before the 1993 election the government's advertising bill was just $3 million; by Keating's last election, in 1996, it was up to $9 million, although the biggest chunk of this was on recruitment for the defence forces - hardly a politically partisan area.

In Howard's first election in 1998 the government spent $29.5 million, most of it on plugging a GST that was not even draft legislation - it was in no more than Howard's election policy. In 2001 the bill was $78 million. And this year the budget allocates a staggering $123 million to blanketing the screens with actors saying "sounds good" whenever one of the government's dubious changes to the system is mentioned.

Housing may be starting to slump, but the advertising industry is looking at boom times.

Mark Latham's promise to bring things under control, and perhaps force the plunderers to return the money, is good policy; but it will need a lot more of it to repair the damage caused by his back flip on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

For Labor, the PBS has become almost as iconic as Medicare; holding the line against increases in the cost of vital drugs for the needy was an article of faith. Indeed, it was one of Labor's key reservations about the Not-free Trade Agreement with America.

Now it has been blown away, and for what? Labor will have another billion dollars to play with for its election platform, but what cause could be more urgent, more in line with traditional Labor priorities, than the PBS?

Latham has just added a few more rungs to his ladder of political opportunity.

My school didn't have a flag-raising ceremony, nor did we sing the national anthem on a daily basis; as one of my schoolmates wrote the last time Howard raised the values issue, we considered such activities rather vulgar, even common.

But education minister Brendan Nelson, who gasped in disbelief and despair that some schools do not even have a motto, will be relieved to know that ours did: Esse Quam Videre, which translates as "To be rather than to seem." Given the number of old boys who have been before the courts on various fraud charges it has not been all that effective in setting their courses in later life, but as Howard and Nelson will assure you, it's the symbolism that counts, not the substance.

Howard's own Canterbury Boys High rejoices in the slogan Truth and Honour, and we will leave it to the readers to decide how well Little Johnny has lived up to it. But logic requires that he extend the idea of a motto beyond the schools and into other public institutions.

His government has long ago adapted President Harry Truman's famous dictum to its own purposes: every minister's desk should bear the promise: The Buck Stops Somewhere Else.

And the Prime Minister himself could well adopt the banner: Ego in Perpetuum. In Latin it sounds so much better than Me Forever.