A low key presentation. Quite a contrast this morning between the way the Fairfax papers have handled the Nielsen poll showing the election race has got much closer and the treatment The Australian normally gives to a Newspoll finding which records a drop for Labor. The fall in Labor’s two-party preferred standing to 51% — the figure is down two percentage points on the month before and the Liberal share is the highest it has been since June 2006 — was given secondary treatment to the finding that a clear majority of those polled support Kevin Rudd’s hospital plan.
My guess is that the Labor Party is more inclined to believe this latest result that the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Hence the decision of Kevin Rudd not to go to the nuclear disarmament talks in the United States last week and the increasingly frenetic wheeling and dealing in the last few days to sweeten the hospitals financial package for the states.
Not just anti-Labour. Among those caught by surprise at the amazing surge by the Liberal Democrats in the UK is clearly the mighty Murdoch empire. Until now the big selling London Sun has turned its propaganda guns on Gordon Brown’s Labour Government but this morning the target is clearly the Liberal Democrats who a YouGov poll in the paper now has leading the three party field.
Anyone looking for a reason why the policies of the Lib Dems are dismissed as “potty” need go no further than this column in The Guardian:
A gauge of just how dramatically things have changed in the UK since the first debate between the three party leaders is shown in this graph of the market at Betfair:
Jobs for the boys. Reassuring to see that self interest is still a primary motivation for politicians. For a while there last week it looked like Labor would actually give up some Cabinet posts to help ensure stable government in Tasmania but the Caucus revolted and would only agree to providing the Greens with one job. It was ever thus. Self interest is the one sure winner in any political contest and anyone standing between an MP and a ministerial salary and a chauffeur driven car always gets run over as Premier David Bartlett now knows.
Tweeting from obscurity. Steve Gibbons is one of those backbench MPs that only the most devoted followers of Federal politics will have heard of for most of his 12 years in the House of Representatives. Now his skill on Twitter is at last taking him to a larger audience:
Pity we don’t have a “Clegg” option in Australia – just the same boring duopoly!
Living in London 20-odd years ago, I briefly bought the Sun to read on the tube … because it said ‘Forward with the People’ on its masthead.
I’m shocked …. Shocked! … to know that ANY newspaper would, on its front page (not even an opinion piece) describe a candidate party in an election as having ‘potty policies’.
Obviously Fleet Street has become even more Grub Street since I left the Isle.
But then, since I don’t read the Aussie competition (Hun, etc) maybe I’m just out of touch with modern journalism today.