This article was published in the CT in March and did not make the web page till now.
I AM a Tony Abbott groupie. I love the Liberal Party. Economically, I think everyone should be allowed to do what they like – to be rich and stay rich. Socially, I think women should be barefoot and pregnant and do what they are told. And refos and gays should be put in their place and George Pell should be Pope.
Then the phone rings. It is a pollster.
Is Julia Gillard doing a good job, I am asked.
The answer is obvious: she is doing a fantastic job. She is annoying the swinging voters and a lot of Labor voters and driving them to vote for my hero Tony.
Then the questions get trickier. Who would you vote for if an election were held today, I am asked.
Tough question. But I am so enthralled by Tony that I think I should say I will vote Labor. This is because I want Labor to have just enough support to think that they just might win the next election under Gillard.
I think that if the poll shows Labor support under Gillard at 19 per cent and under Rudd it would be 43 per cent, even the dullest most union-captured Federal Labor MP would want to replace Gillard with Rudd.
If Rudd leads Labor there is a faint chance Labor would win in September and my hero Tony would lose.
So I tell the pollster Gillard is better than Abbott and that I will vote Labor.
Far-fetched. No. It’s politics.
Some dyed-in-the-wool Labor supporters have been known to invite into their very homes campaigning Liberal Party candidates for long discussions and cups of tea – just to keep them off the streets and burn up their campaign effort.
It would be very hard to get more than anecdotal evidence of this sort of poll response. But we see the unprincipled wretchedness of modern politics – not only of the politicians but also their staff, their groupies and all the party hangers on. We see the Graham Richardson credo of “whatever it takes”. So lying to a pollster seems an almost natural consequence.
There is some US research indicating that in primary elections, Republicans vote in the Democratic primary for the weakest and most detested candidate and vice versa.
The combined total of “I thing Julia is doing a great job because she makes my hero Tony more likely to be elected” and “I want Labor to look better than it really is so they don’t make Kevin leader”, might be as much as 2 or 3 per cent. This is about the margin or error for these polls.
This week two academics have pointed to two polling effects that seem to cancel each other out – the bandwagon and the underdog effects.
Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University says that people being polled know who is winning and want to be on the winning side so say they will vote for that side – a bandwagon effect.
Yet Professor Murray Goot, of Macquarie University, says that politicians want to be seen as the underdog. They do not want to be seen as arrogant.
But, logically, there is no contradiction here. Both academics can be right. Politicians might want to portray themselves as ever so humble, unarrogant underdogs so as not to turn off Australian voters who hate skites. But the voters themselves might still well be attracted to a humble politician who is nonetheless in the lead.
No better example comes to mind than Bob Menzies. In the lead, seen to be in the lead, but never taking his voters for granted and never presuming he would win.
All that said, the party behind in the polls six months out has won the election in four of the most recent seven election. That indicates that the campaign itself is very significant – as it should be.
In all, the polls have proved to be fairly accurate gauges of public opinion. The closer to the election, the more accurate they become.
The bandwagoner, the underdog sympathiser and the party groupie are but small pebbles on the tide of public opinion.
The real pity is that the politicians themselves take so much notice of the polls. The idiocy of tossing out a first-term head of government is not confined to the Labor Party. The conservatives are infected by the same madness – first a Victorian Premier, then a Northern Territory Chief Minister.
Is it related to rampant consumerism that makes people throw out relatively new items because something new has come out.
If so the voters are sadly mistaken. New consumer items are usually cheaper and better than the models they superceed. That is the wonder of capitalism.
But the new leader is often worse than the one replaced. That is the nature of politics.
DOT DOT DOT
Ten years ago this Tuesday, Australia began its third-longest war – in Iraq. If we stay for just five more months, as is likely, it will eclipse Vietnam and become Australia’s second-longest war. Australia’s longest war – in Afghanistan – began 18 months before the invasion of Iraq and still Australian soldiers die there.
These three wars were hopelessly misguided.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars – like most wars — have resulted in precisely the opposite of what was intended.
World War I – the war to end all wars – set up the conditions for World War II.
Afghanistan and Iraq were wars to stop terrorism. But they played into terrorists’ hands. The wars made recruitment to terror easier. The West is more terrorised now than it would have been if we had never sought revenge for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Every time war is at hand, the public goes into a jingoistic frenzy. It will all be over by Christmas (1914) they said of the war that continued until Novermber 1918.
Support for the Afghan and Iraq invasions was overwhelming in the lead up, and then it slowly eroded until neither war is supported by a majority in either the US or Australia. It was the same in Vietnam.
How can we stop this jingoistic folly that encourages politicians to press the war button? By better education of the flag-waving public and exposure of the politicians who exploit them.
And there would be no better way to do that than have a full open inquiry into Australia’s decisions to enter the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Have we got the national fortitude to engage in honest self-assessment?
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 16 March 2013.