A recent Herald-Nielsen poll, the first since the election, shows Tony Abbott trailing Bill Shorten by twenty points on head to head approval ratings, and labor leading the coalition 52-48 on two party preferred. Yet Abbott won the election. What's going on?
Radio National's political commentators sounded quite flummoxed the other day. He suggested that it was perhaps down to the fact that Labor and Shorten hadn't done much since the election, what with needing to get their house in order, and this has placed more attention on Abbott and his administration's first weeks. Those weeks have not been good, with the Indonesian spying controversy, Scott Morrison's contempt for the media and government accountability and Pyne's comments on Gonsky, among other things.
This analysis is wrong. Anyone with a memory of more than last week should remember that neither Abbott nor his administration were popular at the time of the last election. The Liberal coalition's strong victory should be accredited to the most toxic anti-Labor environment in Australia's history, thanks largely to Labor's internal machinations, which were decidedly un-Australian. It was also, if you subscribe to the cyclical view of Australia politics (big reforms followed by very conservative governments), simply time for labor to go - they'd done their job of implementing big ticket policies (carbon tax, Gonski, national disability insurance scheme etc), and now it was time for a more unadventurous government before things got out of hand (with media and offence laws, for example).
Now that Labor is out, the public has quickly turned their attention to letting Abbott and the Liberal-National coalition know they don't like them either. The Liberals in opposition were relentlessly negative, contemptuous of facts and duplicitous (what ever happened to that budget emergency?). They were not popular then and they are even less popular now.
The fact that one of the ABCs top political correspondents was baffled by the poll and could only site events from the past month as reasons for the highly unusual data is a sorry indication of our media's obsession with what happened last minute, and its inability to consider (if they are even familiar with it) the narrative arc of Australia's political history and the tendencies of its citizens. And before anyone says anything - the right wing media have been just us banal in their reporting as the ABC. The only article I've read taking a longer view of this poll came from the Sydney Morning Herald.
The approach of the average Australian to politics is to go with 'the vibe', which doesn't change on a day by day basis depending on who best managed the media cycle for the last 24 hours. Our media has become too obsessed with gossip rather than news and proselytising their ideologies rather than conducting political analysis. Not wonder all our papers are making losses.
Radio National's political commentators sounded quite flummoxed the other day. He suggested that it was perhaps down to the fact that Labor and Shorten hadn't done much since the election, what with needing to get their house in order, and this has placed more attention on Abbott and his administration's first weeks. Those weeks have not been good, with the Indonesian spying controversy, Scott Morrison's contempt for the media and government accountability and Pyne's comments on Gonsky, among other things.
This analysis is wrong. Anyone with a memory of more than last week should remember that neither Abbott nor his administration were popular at the time of the last election. The Liberal coalition's strong victory should be accredited to the most toxic anti-Labor environment in Australia's history, thanks largely to Labor's internal machinations, which were decidedly un-Australian. It was also, if you subscribe to the cyclical view of Australia politics (big reforms followed by very conservative governments), simply time for labor to go - they'd done their job of implementing big ticket policies (carbon tax, Gonski, national disability insurance scheme etc), and now it was time for a more unadventurous government before things got out of hand (with media and offence laws, for example).
Now that Labor is out, the public has quickly turned their attention to letting Abbott and the Liberal-National coalition know they don't like them either. The Liberals in opposition were relentlessly negative, contemptuous of facts and duplicitous (what ever happened to that budget emergency?). They were not popular then and they are even less popular now.
The fact that one of the ABCs top political correspondents was baffled by the poll and could only site events from the past month as reasons for the highly unusual data is a sorry indication of our media's obsession with what happened last minute, and its inability to consider (if they are even familiar with it) the narrative arc of Australia's political history and the tendencies of its citizens. And before anyone says anything - the right wing media have been just us banal in their reporting as the ABC. The only article I've read taking a longer view of this poll came from the Sydney Morning Herald.
The approach of the average Australian to politics is to go with 'the vibe', which doesn't change on a day by day basis depending on who best managed the media cycle for the last 24 hours. Our media has become too obsessed with gossip rather than news and proselytising their ideologies rather than conducting political analysis. Not wonder all our papers are making losses.
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