When Pauline Hanson announced she was running for the Senate she made a remark that she was putting her own money on the line. It sounded like a good fundraising pitch, but it’s only right that she stump up. If today’s Sunday Mail is correct, she will be close to being a millionaire by the close of polls on October 9th. No-one should feel sorry for her, let alone donate to her cause.
Candidates and parties who receive more than 4% of the vote in the Senate receive 193.397 cents per vote, irrespective of whether they spend the money or not. The Sunday Mail says that on the basis of their poll Hanson will win 22% of the popular vote. Using this year’s percentage and last election’s voter turnout, that is gross income of $896,155.48.
Pauline’s costs will be minimal. A cheap how-to-vote card will cost maybe 2 cents a copy, while in each of the state’s 28 electorates she may need to put up say 6 signs at each of 10 booths. The cost of all of that would be no more than $70,000. Hanson is so newsworthy in her own right that she won’t need to place television advertisements or letterbox drop, so I can’t see any other outlays apart from her deposit, which will be refunded to her. So, Hanson’s nett take, just from the public pocket will be a shade over $800,000.
Of course it won’t stop there. She will receive donations, and raise funds. Just recently she reportedly sold a jumper she knitted in prison for $3,000 at a memorabilia auction.
And, if the Sunday Mail is correct, she will be elected, returning her at least another $600,000 over 6 years.
Even if the Sunday Mail is not correct and she only does as well as last time, she will still nett around $346,000. Not bad for three weeks of appearances on late night TV and the odd Women’s Weekly feature.
Hanson went to jail because she was so keen to get her hands on the public funding dollar that she rorted her party system to ensure that candidates and members had no control over it. In that case she had to pay it all back. This time around she’s smarter. Running as number one in an independent team in tandem with her real estate agent sister Hanson doesn’t have to answer to anyone else.
Pauline lists her occupation as self-employed. The next three weeks promise to be a bumper profit reporting season for Pauline Hanson Inc.

I’ve been waiting for the John Howard to start hitting the buttons that our research says he should. One of those is that voters feel Latham is not sufficiently experienced to be Prime Minister.
In this article from The Age Howard says that the government has no plans to decrease the rate of the GST and takes the opportunity to punch Latham.

It’s a question of spending the money wisely and I find it extraordinary that the leader of the opposition should have a federal schools policy where he’s going to spend more money in areas where the states have underfunded despite the enormous GST revenue they have.
That just shows an amateurish misunderstanding.

I made a similar point in my earlier post on education funding. I’m wondering if the Prime Minister is going to make any of the others I make. Perhaps Labor advisors should read it as well. As voters don’t know much about Latham, it leaves the way open for the government to paint the detail in.
Howard certainly needs to do some work on selling the GST. One of its benefits was that he was giving a growth tax to the states to replace a number of unfair state taxes, like stamp duty and payroll tax with limited growth. Now that we know how much growth is in the GST, you’d think the PM would be pressing harder not just for better funding of services, but reduction of some of those other taxes and pressing home the Labor equals high taxes line.
That he is not doing a good job here is illustrated by the first line from the SMH story. “Prime Minister John Howard has ruled out cutting the GST rate despite figures showing a bumper windfall of almost $12 billion over five years.” “Despite”! What is “despite” doing in that sentence? It might help to counter the line that Labor was trying to run that Howard would put the GST up, but illustrates a lack of understanding on the part of the The Age’s journalist.
Still, one should not get carried away with the growth in the GST. The take is almost certainly fuelled by our debt funded consumption binge, which is unsustainable. Higher GST this year probably means lower GST, relatively speaking, in future years.

Pauline Hanson won’t win a senate seat, but her candidacy should put the National Party over the line in Queensland and enhance the chances of the Democrats of retaining theirs.
Last election the senate results were as follows:

The only other thing that you need to know to understand what is likely to happen this time is that a senate quota is 14.3%. Any candidate that achieves a quota will be elected, and any vote that they receive in excess of that will be distributed to the next person on their preference list. Any candidate achieving less than a quota will be eliminated in order of lowest vote. As a candidate is eliminated their votes are allocated to the next person on their preference list.
Last election both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party achieved two quotas each, leaving two seats to be decided on preferences. The Liberal Party had 6.12 percentage points of their vote left to distribute, and the ALP 3.
What then happened was that there was enough of the Liberal tail to get the National Party over the line. The Democrats kept sufficiently ahead of the Greens to take a combination of their preferences and ALP preferences to win the final spot. No-one preferenced One Nation, so while they won two-thirds of a quota, they never came any closer.
While a National Party victory was never in much doubt, it was touch and go for the Democrats. Add the ALP votes to the Green ones and you are looking at 6.3% to 6.6%. Who wins depends on how the “Others” split.
So, what will happen this election? Who knows? Senate votes are a bit of a lottery, but here goes. Let’s assume that the major party votes stay pretty much where they are. Perhaps the Liberal vote will sink and Labor rise, but these shifts shouldn’t have a major effect on the ultimate result. Where the real movements are likely to be is in the minor party votes.
One Nation’s ten percent had to be to a large extent a Hanson vote as she was the candidate. One can therefore assume that most of that will either dissipate or transfer across, depending on Hanson’s popularity in three weeks’ time. We’ll have to wait a few weeks until we have any reliable polling on that (the one that someone will surely publish tomorrow or the day after won’t measure much more than initial enthusiasm), but let’s say Hanson wins 5%.
In that case, what will happen is that, unlike last election, Hanson’s vote will end up being distributed. Who will it go to? It is not likely to be the Labor Party, nor is it likely to be the Liberals. My bet is that most of it will go to the National Party.
Certainly the National Party has been angling for it. When Liberal State Director Geoff Greene made some ill-considered comments last week about how the Liberal Party would win three Senate positions in Queensland at the expense of the National Party, Nationals President, Terry Bolger told him off. There is no doubt that the Nationals will do all they can to win back their senate seat.
At the same time National Senate candidate Barnaby Joyce said there was nothing to stop the Nationals preferencing Pauline Hanson because she was running as an Indepedent. Nationals Federal Leader, John Anderson, has said Hanson will be second last on their ticket, just before One Nation itself. A parliamentary leader’s opinion on the matter is just one amongst many – before getting in too deep here John Anderson should talk to Rob Borbidge who was knee-capped on this matter by the organisation during the 1998 state campaign. Even if Anderson does prevail, they may not direct preferences to her, but what is the betting that many Nationals will be handing out her how-to-vote cards. Hanson has to send her preferences somewhere, and the Nationals will probably look to her as pretty much the best of a bad lot.
Hanson’s preferences, plus the Nationals first preferences will most likely give them a quota and therefore a seat.
What will happen with the rest of the votes? A lot depends on who goes out first. The Democrats have virtually disappeared as a party, but they are in less danger in Queensland than most other states because the Greens vote is so low here. There are a number of reasons for the low Greens vote, but one of them is Pauline Hanson. Most who vote Greens are not environmentalists, they are protest voters. Voting Greens is a respectable way of them saying “I want none of the above” without wasting their vote and voting informal.
But in Queensland the Greens have had competition for the protest vote from One Nation and others, so their vote has been depressed. With Hanson in the race, the Greens will do less well than otherwise, and that may well help the Democrats. The Greens are also fielding Drew Hutton, who is a perennially unsuccessful candidate in Queensland elections, having run more frequently and with spectacularly less success than Hanson. If you want to say “Up yours” in Queensland, Greens isn’t a really good way to do it.
That gives the Democrats a slim chance of getting home, particularly if Liberal, Labor and Nationals all preference them ahead of the Greens. If they can get enough preferences to get in front of the Greens, then Greens preferences will get them there.
Poor old Pauline. The media have made much of her marriages and alleged romantic relationships, but in politics since her initial success she has only ever been the bridesmaid, never the bride. Waiting at the door of the church with their rosettes in their button holes, the Nationals and the Democrats must be breathing a sigh of relief that she is turning up yet again.
But they shouldn’t take anything for granted. If they make too big a fuss about her, they may actually increase her vote. The more people talk about Hanson, the better she will do. The Nationals having a row with their federal leader about preferencing her would actullay do more to help her than anything else, as would the Democrats demonising her in pamphletts and press releases. It would be best for both if they wait by the door with their lips sealed.

Labor’s education policy ditches Howard’s transparent and fair funding formula in favour of rewarding Labor state governments and teachers’ unions at the same time playing the politics of envy and the art of the sectional special deal.
For decades now the teachers’ unions have been waging a campaign against Federal Government funding of private schools. I remember my friend Mary Kelly, then President of the QTU, whingeing about it back in 1986 or thereabouts. They were probably complaining when Menzies first implemented the idea in 1963.
For the last couple of years the intensity of their campaign has risen, with National Highways and airways littered with the detritus. The campaign has intensified, partly as a result of the federal government’s decision to put the funding of private schools on a transparent basis.
For years private schools have been funded on the basis of more or less self-reported need. This was obviously open to manipulation. A couple of years ago the federal government changed this, calculating need on the basis of the income profiles of families sending their children to private schools. Without using the actual tax returns of families they estimated incomes on the basis of the socio-demographic of the areas from which they drew students. (This can be done fairly precisely on the basis of the 200 or so houses making up a census collector district).
As a result of this something was crystallised. Many of the people sending their children to the wealthier private schools were actually poorer than many of those sending their children to the needier private schools, and judged on this basis some of the pooer schools were over-paid and the richer schools under-paid.
Let me put this in a more personal perspective. Both my sisters and I went to primary school at St Joseph’s at Kangaroo Point, by any definition one of the needier schools, certainly compared to East Brisbane State where we started our education. In secondary school I went to Villanova, a second tier catholic school, and they went to Sommerville House, an elite protestant school. The family income was modest and didn’t vary much in the time we were all at school, except that my parents were on the aged pension when my younger sister matriculated. However, my parents effectively received significantly more assistance towards my schooling than they did towards my sisters’, even though their need was at least the same for all of us, and arguably greater when my younger sister was finishing.
Was this a reasonable thing? Were we just an anomaly? Well, the government’s SES tables which rank schools for the socio-economic status of students actually suggest that in terms of income there is not really much separating those who send their kids to Sommerville House or Villanova.
But what happens when you adjust for that impartial assessment is that Villanova potentially loses money, and Sommerville House gains it. The Federal Government is too canny to do that, so they increased all funding, but it increased a little more for some of the schools that have historically been underpaid. This creates the impression that rich private schools are being advantaged to the detriment of poor schools, and it is that perception that Labor is playing on.
That’s not the only politics in the announcement. It is allegedly a $2.4 billion package, but $520 million is already being spent in the sector. It is to be taken from some of the richer schools and given to the poorer ones. It is not apparent who will be the winners here, but $378 million will go to Catholic schools who have done a special deal with the Opposition called a “Community Charter”.
Details of the charter aren’t up on the website, but it has the smell of sectarianism about it, and the special wheels and deals that used to go into private school funding policies. The big growth in private schools has been in Anglican, other protestant denomination and Muslim schools. They appear to have been left out in the cold here
Catholic schools aren’t the only ones that get a special deal. The word “historic” has made a come back in the Labor lexicon. Once upon a time, in the Hawke and Keating years, everything Labor did was “historic”. Now it’s back, this time as a description of the deal that Latham has done with the states on this one. Some deal. Not only have the states reaped record receipts from the GST, which are meant to pay for education, amongst other things, but now Latham Labor is effectively topping them up another $1.9 billion. Someone’s numerate here, and it’s not the feds.
There are strings attached however. Not only will the states have to implement reporting procedures (something which Brendan Nelson already appears to have achieved for a fraction the cost of this package), but they will have to “teach Australian values”. What exactly will those be?
Despite the charges of those on the left, when Howard talked about parents sending their children to private schools because they wanted them to be taught values he wasn’t talking about a particular set of values, but he was talking about values specific to those parents that they didn’t think could be taught in the state school system.
Latham’s policy is taking funds from the value pluralists, the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and non-denominational schools and giving it back to the state to administer. One can only wonder what sort of anodyne platitudes these funds will go to promote.
Still, this is smart politics. The blue collar vote that Hanson won and Howard won back has strong DLP elements. Menzies pitched to them with the original federal funding of private schools, because DLP equalled Catholic, and it was Catholic schools who were the benficiaries of his initial policy. That the Catholic systemic schools were prepared to cut a deal this election indicates that they are prepared to back Labor. Just like the last election, at one level this election is about what happens to the vote that for a short period of time went to One Nation.
With this policy Latham gets a wedge in there, rewards the teachers’ unions, and gives a little more to state governments. Still, I’ll be interested to see whether it is really a vote shifter. If the government could get their rhetoric right on this one they could show the policy up for the pacification of special interest groups and pitch to envy that it is.