The press is giving last night’s first election debate to Kevin Rudd. Channel’s 9 and 10 gave it to Mr Rudd. Channel 7 to Mr Abbott. My own view is the latter, that Tony Abbott won it by a nose. Why?
Generally speaking it was dead bore with neither candidate giving us much to really chew over.
But within the confines of such choreographed political theatre, Mr Abbott presented well. He was measured and credible. He directed his answers at a precise and narrow set of policy items framed within a narrative of unity and cogent ideology of self-interest. Yet he did not come across as negative or lacking vision.
He was weak on his budget position, how he will “stop the boats” and on the end of the China boom. Ironically, all areas of traditional strength for the Coalition.
Yet Mr Rudd failed to land a killer blow in these areas. Mr Rudd had periods of excellent fluency but moments of quiet petulance as well as he was caught out spinning immigration and budget statistics. His attack on Mr Abbott’s supposed plans to raise the GST lacked ballast, largely because he had failed to make a strong enough case for the end of the China boom. His attack on Mr Abbott’s “turn back the boats” policy was probably his best moment. He also used the NBN well throughout.
But my view is reinforced following this debate. Mr Abbott remains the firm favourite largely because the election has been called too early and Mr Rudd has not dedicated enough time to explaining the need to prepare the nation for a different and more difficult economy. Mr Abbott’s platform has large policy gaps, but without a strong narrative about the changing economy, Mr Rudd has no way to expose them.
The small target needs a big challenge to show it up and right now Mr Rudd is too busy “being positive” to offer it.
Meanwhile, from Mark the Ballot, weekend polls have the the Coalition stretching its (pre-debate) lead:
Today we have the third Newspoll in a row with 48-52 for the Coalition. More surprising has been the Morgan result with the Coalition ahead 48.5-51.5, calculated using preferences flows from from the 2010 Election. The Rudd restoration polls follow.
Using LOESS to take some of the noise out, the individual polling houses tell a story of a two to four week honeymoon, followed by a decline in two party preferred (TPP) voting intention for the ALP. (Note: with only two data points, I do not calculate a LOESS for Nielsen).
Collectively, the 30 day LOESS picture is as follows:
Caveats: the LOESS technique can be overly influenced by outlier data points at the end of the series. Today’s endpoint is probably overly influenced by the last ReachTEL poll. It may also be overly influenced by the Morgan collapse, which at 3.5 percentage points (peak to trough) is almost double the next house at 2 percentage points.
Turning to the aggregation, we have:
Caveat: The zero line in the house effects chart is the average bias across the six polling houses I am tracking. You will need to come to your own view about where the actual level of systemic bias across the polls actually lies. At the 2010 Election (with a different set of pollsters), the population voting intention was about one percentage point more in the Coalition’s favour than the pollster average (see here).
Because I have a soft spot for the grand old dames of Australian opinion polling, the Nielsen and Newspoll only (non-linear) aggregation follows …
I will do another post tonight, after I have digested the Essential poll.
Newspoll in full
