(Cross post from What the people want). Tomorrow’s Galaxy poll (with the teaser released today on the CM website) confirms our polling. It shows a six percent swing against the government. My polling suggests 7% or thereabouts. Pretty damn close, particularly as we don’t really set-out to measure quants.
So, emboldened by this result I’m going to make a few more quant predictions. On my sample it looks as though the Gold Coast and Central Queensland will swing most against the government. Brisbane is looking at the average swing, Far North Queensland and the Sunshine Coast a bit less than average and areas west of Brisbane a little more.
I am not going to put figures to this because the sample sizes are just too small. But it will be interesting on election night, if these figures hold true in our polling, to see whether they translate into results.

(Cross posted from What the people want.) In the first week of the election there has been a strong swing in sentiment against the government, somewhere in the vicinity of 7.5%. If this were reflected in the election result Queensland would most likely have a new government and a hung parliament.
Voters see this election as being about the government, not the opposition, and they appear to be punishing it for its governing of the state.
Our surveys are of people who are most likely to lead debate. They are people who write on blogs, ring talkback radio, write letters to the editor and talk politics to friends, relatives and neighbours.
While they may not be a randomised sample of the total population they provide a good lead as to where public opinion is heading.
In June last year they told us that the government was in trouble. On a two-party preferred basis they favoured the then Coalition by 52% to 48%. Since then there has been a 7% improvement in the coalition vote on virtually the same group of people.

(Note: most pollsters allocate preferences as they were allocated at the last election, we ask voters how they would allocate. These figures catch all those proposing to just vote one and not allocate a preference.)
This improvement in the two-party preferred vote is mirrored in the first preference vote, with the Liberal National Party (I have added the Liberal and National Party votes together before the merged entity came into being) first preference vote up 7% since June last year.
While Labor was down in January the lost voters were initially warehoused mostly with Greens and Independents. It was only after the election that they moved across to the LNP.

What has caused this movement?
It doesn’t appear to be anything to do with Lawrence Springborg. His approval rating with this group has actually been declining at the same time his own party’s vote is increasing.

Although not as quickly as Anna Bligh’s approval rating.

Despite what they will personally do with their votes, our respondents are telling us that they still expect Labor to win.

Although they’d like the Coalition to win, but not by as much as their voting intentions suggest. A significant minority would like to see a hung parliament.

If Springborg hasn’t caused this shift in sentiment, what has?
It’s possible that calling an election is a large part of the problem as the table below showing the numbers more ore less likely to vote for the government as a result of calling the election early suggests.

But note how the net figure hasn’t changed much, even though those on both sides of the proposition have.
Which suggests that the major reason is general dissatisfaction with the way the state is heading.

All of which means that the elction is currently framed for our voters as a vote of confidence or no-confidence in the government, rather than a vote for the government or the opposition. If it stays that way, and on the assumption that our respondents are ahead of the curve, there is a very good chance that the opposition will win.
I’ll be posting results of the qual in the next couple of days.

Last week I said the gov is planning to cut back on public disclosure requirements for industrial carbon emissions.
Today they replied to my email query, and even sent the discussion paper.
Yes, the period for comment was brief, but closer to 3 weeks than a few days. And yes, it will cut back on some public disclosure requirements, but this is a result of inputs from stakeholders who said the current arrangements are confusing and lead to double counting as energy production gets counted twice if they become inputs to further production downstream.
On the face of it, this seems reasonable. But then gov docs always seem reasonable. And very quickly, it gets beyond my technical capacity to assess. In terms of transparency, I always would go for a bigger serving, with heaps of public education as sauce. If the data will still be collected by the gov, as the discussion paper says, and this is useful to bureaucrats, then why shouldn’t the informed public be able to see it too, as they can distill and pass it along to non-specialists?
The deeper question is how does the shape of our energy usage, production and CO2 become useful public information? What does such education and information look like, and even more important, who educates the public?
As a passionate but easily befuddled member of the public, I know only a few things about Australia’s CO2 emissions:
a) there is a climate emergency
b) Australia is massively and disproportionally dependent on coal for domestic electricity and export income
c) our per capita emissions are among the very highest in the world
d) we are not moving by leaps and bounds into energy efficiency or renewables
But things are not always as they seem on the surface, and maybe this time, the gov is actually getting it right. Below is the reply, which I copy just to avoid perhaps mis-stating their polite argument:
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In relation to your concerns regarding public disclosure of greenhouse and energy data, please note that the amendment Bill does not propose removing requirements under the Act to publicly disclose greenhouse gas
emissions or energy consumption information. Neither does the bill change existing requirements that corporations which trigger thresholds must report all greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and energy production.
The amendment bill does propose removing the obligation to publish corporate level energy production data. This is on the basis that publishing corporate level energy production totals will result in public information that is not useable due to double counting of primary and secondary energy production. Energy production information will be
disclosed through Australia’s National Energy Statistics and other sources as identified in the attached consultation paper. Collection of energy production data will remain an important component of the NGER Act to inform government and underpin the National Energy Statistics. The proposed amendment will not affect collection of this information, which will be used to produce publicly available energy production statistics.
A public consultation paper on the proposed amendment to energy production disclosure was released on the 28 January 2009 and the call for submissions on this proposal was open until 17 February 2009. The consultation paper, which outlines the proposed amendment is attached for your information.
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If anyone can enlighten me, feel free.

There’s nothing wrong with a good aporphism/cliche, and ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ is as reliable as they come.
The previous government gave about $18 million (that’s taxpayers’ money) to Pacific Brands, and the current government is now disappointed that the execs have used some of that to triple their salaries while presiding over the demise of quite a few jobs in the perennially endangered textile, clothing and footwear industries.
Disappointed perhaps, but not surprised. Government is, among other things, a mechanism for redistributing resources, much as a jukebox transforms loose change into music. The idea is that if you press the right buttons, you get the song you want. With government, the outcomes more often seem to rely on nebulous winks and nods, or perhaps wishful thinking.
If you give people money with no strings attached, you can’t really expect them to spend it the way you want them to. As with the pre-Christmas bonuses to those on pensions: was that intended to be a sop for the pokie industry? This taxpayer isn’t happy with that outcome.
Back to the $18 m subsidy to Pacific Brands: what is the real game here? It seems to me that trying to hang onto lowly paid and lowly skilled jobs for Australians and Vietnamese immigrants isn’t really a higher good than letting those jobs go offshore to even more lowly paid and lowly skilled Chinese. Further down the track, these Chinese jobs will translate into purchases of Australian coal and iron, and thus employ more Australians.
Some believe the global crisis is at least partly about oversupply of manufactured goods. It is certainly about over-enthusiasm for the development of more capacity, and the larger pie of debt that underpins it.
What if we are all blackbirds in the same pie? What if the pie is finite, rather than a magic pudding? What if government has been sloppy or worse in not demanding that exec salaries be hemmed in as a condition of these subsidies?
The Economist magazine argues, and I agree, that subsidies for manufacturing are purely distorting of the economy, and that government is not very good at allocating lottery tickets to winners and losers. The jukebox is all too often a random choice of what music is playing after the money runs out.
On another sad note for the Rudd gov, it seems that their little song about increasing transparency in government was no more meaningful than a nursery rhyme, or perhaps an advertising jingle. But if you are dead set on a trading scheme that will not reduce our emissions or contribute to the pubic good, you wouldn’t want people to be able to follow a reporting and auditing trail, now would you?
The government will be pouring many thousands of times more money than $18 m into the jukebox of subsidies, this time to the fossil fuel (read coal) industry. And there will be even less liklihood that the song we will hear will have anything to do with Australia’s long term resilience. The writing is on the wall for coal globally, and it ain’t written in invisible ink.
Thanks to the wonders of internet activism, I have found out (and am really hoping you are interested) that the government’s Department of Climate Change has put out draft legislation to amend the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act so eliminate public disclosure of heavy polluters’ emissions.
Following on accusations this past week that Penny (ah, Penny, I had such high hopes for you!) and Kev are deliberately encouraging public misunderstanding about the potential benefits of their Emissions Trading Scheme, this is a low blow indeed.
GetUp shot the info around, and apparently the gov has only allowed a few days for comments on this draft legislation.
Now whatever you might think about climate change and its causes, it would be hard to argue that good public policy would allow less transparency on this hot potato issue about who is emitting what.
But don’t take my word for it, you can ask them yourself: reporting@climatechange.gov.au
Another few thousand dollars of government (the taxpayer again) coinage has been paid, on my partner’s behalf, into the jukebox to hear the song ‘rural broadband’. He applied, and a company received, $3000 from the federal gov to install a satellite internet receiver on our wanna-be eco shed at the coast. It took about 3 hours to install, and if cable TV dishes are any comparison, the dish itself isn’t worth more than a few hundred. Who knows? I guess the sign up fees for domestic access to satellite was a big part of the bill. In any case, that seems a lot of money for a little job, but we are grateful to have other taxpayers pick up the tab. And while I don’t know what other arrangements could have avoided that gov subsidy, surely there are other possiblities, such as microwave.
Maybe I should have called this blog ‘government as jokebox.’