There’s lots of crowing by opponents of the right in both Australia and the US that the right are in grave trouble. It always looks that way. And in Australia it does look like oppositions spend a lot of time out of power. But there’s always a lot of luck involved. Howard was cruising to a loss in 2001 before the audacity of Howard’s hope with the Tampa and Sept 11 turned things around. Now John Quiggin says that the Libs can’t go anywhere if they don’t get more credible on greenhouse.
Likewise everyone’s laughing at the Republicans and Bruce Bartlett tells us they’ve got to get themselves together and get back into that middle ground.
All of which leads me to say . . . Perhaps.
I haven’t noticed that it matters that much whether parties are credible to the policy elite. If a government gets into trouble, they can get credible pretty quickly because the pressure comes on the other side. For instance the Lib’s slipping and sliding on greenhouse looks weak right now. But electricity prices haven’t started rising, firms haven’t started blaming the trading scheme for closing them down (whether it’s true or not). And that’s when their shilly shallying can come in handy. Because they can say “it wouldn’t have happened under our policies”.
And I recall the last US election. For a time there it looked like McCain and Miss Credibility (Not) Sarah Palin were on their way to overtaking Obama’s lead. Their mud was starting to stick and they were pegging Obama back. And then the GFC really took off and McCain proceeded to handle things very badly – as did Palin. Now those guys had about as little cred as you can imagine – on top of GWB’s extraordinary string of stuff ups. But they nearly made it over the line, and may well have done so if the GFC wasn’t so exquisitely timed.
So I’m afraid I think that, while it takes bad luck or bad government to lose an election, once a government is in trouble, Oppositions, even pretty hopeless ones can cobble together sufficient cred to survive a campaign of ‘he said – she said’ reporting and scramble over the line. But I would concede that being in as great a disarray and discomfort as they are right now obviously doesn’t help their chances.
Residential tarrifs in Tasmania going up 25% over three years ahead of contestability. On top of that 30-50% increases are expected on the introduction non-competitive market in electricty when ‘contestability’ comes to Tasmaniam residential customers.
Increases? Mostly because the rainfall patterns that all the dams were planned with have failed to materilaise 20, 30 years down the track. Evidence of global warming? We’re more and more reliant on Vic brown coal power stations. Vicious circle.
Compare: There are 20+ electricity retailers in Vic/Melbourne. There are 4 registered retailers for non-residential Tranches in Tasmania, there were 5 but one gave up after 2 years with no customers.
Competition leads to lower prices my arse. Its the telco communications bizo all over again. Rural areas shafted, metro areas benefit from the theory.
Have a pensioner friend in Melbourne who took every electricty bill she got for two years to the ombudsman. Won every time. Tried to swap providers and it took 18 months to swap. Then charged her $80 for the privilage of disconnected their crap supply. Retail margins are so small (they claim) I guess they can only make money off the lazy or the stupid.
If only these price increses did reflect a carbon tax or emissions tradings scheme already!!
One only need to look to NSW to see that a hopeless govt can still win.
Surely this is universally acknowledged to be true?
Hahahaha. Exquisite timing.
As a final note I don’t see why people have such a hard time understanding that other people might not actually think that Obama is really ‘the One’. McCain-Palin’s supporters included (lots of) people who simply preferred their ideological and policy approach to Obama-Biden.
Patrick, the kind of thing I was thinking of is that the last administration screwed up almost everything it touched – and it touched some pretty big things. There’s a good case that the President and certainly the VP should have been in jail for corporate malfeasance (it’s certainly amazing they weren’t under investigation) and they should both now be in jail for authorising torture.
Sarah Palin was completely incoherent and would pretty obviously say anything, including that her opponent ‘was palling around with terrorists’. Then there was McCain who had a more illustrious past and, having played uneasily from the Republican slime play book, proceeded to back off out of human decency or fear of overreaching himself.
I have no problem with some people ideologically preferring the right. My post wasn’t written from the perspective that Obama is necessarily the greatest. I do have a problem with people preferring people who have been scraped up from so near the bottom of the barrel. The point of my post was that I’m pessimistic that being a complete disgrace, behaving in a way that everyone sees is unacceptable is all that bad for your career though I think for some reason the disciplines work better on the left than the right. Edward Kennedy it turned out really was unelectable after the disgrace that was Chappaquiddick. Something tells me that it mightn’t be so for a pollie on the right – but I accept I can’t prove that.
As I posted elsewhere, specifically regarding the Opposition and climate change:
While UK prime minister Brown has Balls (he’s the Education Secretary) it will be interesting to see whether young Malcolm has the cojones to engage the NSW Liberal Right over the List of Fourteen, which Glenn Milne claims is the deadwood that Malcolm needs to prune.
If they went, plus Nick Minchin (double dissolution perhaps, which would certainly get rid of that twit Fielding), young Malcolm might find it easier to embrace a position on climate change that is closer to the eventual one adopted by John Howard.
But no, that is just too bizarre a scenario.
Nicholas
If you do not consider the currently insanely popular Rudd government to be a huge electoral thumbs up for “right leaning parties” then “right-leaning” has no meaning.
Sorry John, but I don’t know what you’re saying.
I don’t know of anything in economic theory that indicates competition leads to lower prices. There is a suggestion that competition pushes the prices towards the cost of supply plus the cost of investment (i.e. profit for the shareholders) but we all know that cost of both supply and investment is higher in rural areas (sheesh, that’s why we have metro areas). Metro areas benefit from not being required to deliver a cross-subsidy to rural areas on utilities.
The rest is political wrangling between interest groups to see who can get themselves into a marginal seat. We could get into complex philosophical discussions of the fairness of forced wealth transfer but at least might as well be honest about what we are really arguing about.
Nicholas, I am saying that Rudd-Labor is a “right-leaning” government.
Um, Nicholas, first up Big Ted went on to be elected a dozen or so times. He maybe shouldn’t have been but he was. Sure, not for President – but still hardly unelectable.
Secondly:
That is the most insane thing I have ever read of yours. I actually struggle to believe you mean it. Personally, I think that if anything it would be harder for a politician on the right because they would alienate much of their Christian and military ‘base’, permanently, but I am only talking State-level elections there. And I am showing my partisan bias, surely.
But partisanship besides, I just can’t imagine that you can imagine a ‘right’-wing Presidential candidate who drunkenly killed his girlfriend, cynically and amorally framed her as the driver and used his influence to get off scot-free.
Hmm, this is getting a bit frustrating.
I did think as I wrote what I wrote that I should perhaps say that I did know that Ted Kennedy was elected to the Senate umpteen times from the 1970s till now. Then I thought that people would instead of assuming this hadn’t occurred to me, assume that my expression ‘unelectable’ should be read down to the extent of the incongruity. My bad.
I don’t imagine that a right-wing presidential candidate could have got away with Chappaquiddick. I expressed myself much more tentatively than that. Clearly there’s no doubt in your mind, so I’ll bow to your more powerful intuition.
On re-reading what I wrote I actually mislead readers as to what I was thinking which was not so much of a right wing Ted Kennedy getting away with it. What I was thinking was that I doubt a left leaning candidate could have survived with – say – Cheney’s apparent corporate criminality.
I can’t prove that either pretty obviously, but I’ll just set it out here for the record.
‘Dick’ McAuliffe. John Murpha. whatshisface Visclowski. Barney Frank (hey, sleeping with the CEO of your main regulated institution? Tax fraud? Rent control fraud? No worries!) This could get boring.
I am sorry if you don’t think I was sufficiently generous to your writing. I did actually think you knew that he had being elected but on re-reading this certainly doesn’t come across in my ‘sure, not for President’. My bad ;)
And yes your comment most certainly did mislead me along the lines you suggest. I probably wouldn’t have even been moved to respond if you had written initially what you wrote subsequently.
However, I am here now, so: You may have a point that a left leaning politician is theoretically more likely to be judged harshly by his electorate for ‘corporate’ crimes, as opposed to a right wing politician who might be theoretically more harshly judged for, say, ‘moral’ weaknesses.
But I strongly suspect that on both sides there is only the theoretical point – left wing politicians seem to have little difficulty getting as rich as their right wing equivalents, and it beggars all belief to imagine that they are somehow more scrupulous in doing so.
As I’ve written in the past, it’s not so much that rightwing parties are or will become unelectable (as you say, given a bad enough government, any Opposition can get in) but that they run the risk of becoming the B team, only getting in when the other side makes a mess of things, and not lasting long when they do. That seems a pretty good description of State politics in Australia for the last 20 years.
As regards elite credibility, I think it does count for a fair bit in the long run, though of course the elite is not, itself, homogeneous.
John’s point is something of a no-brainer because left wing parties always have the advantage of being more in favour of redistribution. I guess that makes me wonder why, with such an advantage, left wing parties have not had the A team already at national level. Perhaps that tells us something else about left wing parties.
pedro,
It also says something about luck. I think the left leaning govts have been much better percentage players at the federal level since Hawke. Howard, recall lost the 1998 election – but snuck over the line with enough seats. He then was very likely to lose the 2001 election but things went his way (and he played them with great political dexterity and audacity).
So I think John’s point stands up quite well.
A lot of things are easier for me during time of misfortune, so I’m all for left wing governments. So far I am well able to make a living equally well during time of misfortune as during boom time. However a right wing government is required from time to time, to build up an exchequer for a left wing government to redistribute, otherwise the circle of wealth creation-to-squandering-to-wealth creation is broken, then we will all miss out!
Nicholas, the advantage we both agree exists runs back to the creation of the welfare state post WW2. I took Hawke to get it right for Labor. Keating I think showed some of the Whitlam madness and then lost. The Libs lost one election over the GST and nearly lost a second and third. I think at the federal level the labor party has a tendency to alienate itself from a chunk of the electorate on social issues and also from time to time to put on a drunken sailor act. The libs of course are really just less of a social democrat party, at least in theory. In practice they can spend like drunken sailors too.
I don’t agree that Keating spent like a drunken sailor – he was navigating a recession. Whitlam certainly did as did Howard – after his first term when (it turned out) he was too gung ho in pulling back fiscal policy.