Rudd swears; so what? Let's look at van Onselen's track record instead

The swearing Kevin Rudd voters won't see | NEWS.com.au.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd is a foul-mouthed MP who launches into expletive-ridden rants in his office when things go wrong, an explosive new book, Howard's End, claims.

Explosive it ain't if that's the best that  media tart Peter van Onselen can come up with. Remember this is the same genius that so confidently asserted that the ALP had little chance of winning the 2007 election after it replaced Beazley with Rudd.

For instance, van Onselen claimed in December 2006:

much of the Queensland Labor Party organisation doesn't support Rudd ... If Rudd can't persuade large sections of his party in his home state to support him, what makes him think he will be able to persuade the wider Queensland community?

Well, Rudd actually did quite well in Queensland winning 15 additional seats (almost enough to win govt without winning seats elsewhere) with a swing to the ALP of 8.13% - huge.

Even better was this piece of gratuitous analysis by van Onselen:

There is another good reason the ALP should have stopped Rudd from challenging at this late stage of the electoral cycle.

Rudd's track record in prosecuting the case against the Government over AWB indicates he may not have the political skills to defeat Howard at an election.

van Onselen could hardly have been more wrong about Rudd's political skills. But far from being embarrassed by his total lack of insight, van Onselen is now back suggesting that swearing in private might be Rudd's downfall.

Of course, van Onselen wasn't the only commentator guilty of advancing silly views during the last election, as this delightful paragraph from a parliamentary library analysis demonstrates:

An interesting feature of the speculation about the election outcome was the emphasis that many observers put on the probable importance of  local campaigns. Writing soon after Kevin Rudd’s election as party leader, academics Peter van Onselen and Peter Senior stated that as elections were won ‘in individual seats not on national results’, analysis of marginal         electorates led them to believe that it was ‘difficult to see Rudd getting over the line’.In the months following, the same view was expressed by a number of journalists. Paul Kelly referred, for example, to a seat-by-seat campaign being conducted by the Coalition, the consequence of which was that ‘the election is not a foregone conclusion’. Andrew Fraser and John Lyons spoke of ‘discontent’ with the Howard Government. But they did not find ‘sufficient anger for the landslide swing of 16  electorates [that] Labor needs’. Sue Neales claimed that ‘in an era of personality politics, name recognition is everything’. Most strikingly,  and counter-intuitively, Jennifer Hewett wrote of there being different levels of support nationally and locally and that ‘the fight on the ground has been much more evenly matched’ than the national campaign. Many in fact predicted that it would be the efforts by local candidates that would ensure the Coalition’s return to office. For instance, the MP for Longman, Mal Brough, Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, was often spoken of as being certain of re-election, a claim that seemed to be influenced by general media support of his role in the intervention in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. In regard to the view that for every marginal electorate held by the Government, so Labor’s task became harder, Peter Brent of mumble.com.au believed that    it was all caused by ‘federal election-watchers determined to construct that nail-biting finish’.

Peter van Onselen and others like him specialise in giving the media something to say. It doesn't seem to worry him, or them, that it's often straight-out horsesh*t. It surprises me that a political scientist could actually sprout this gobbledygook about local campaigns defying national swings.

Remember, all these predictions of close results and a lack of hostility towards Howard were made against the background of polls that consistently showed the opposite.

Making predictions is pretty daft but if you're going to do it you should at least use the available evidence.

For the record, I made my prediction on 30 October 2007, nearly four weeks before the election, and called it "Get ready for the Ruddslide". I didn't base it on hunches or party spin, I just read the polls.

All the published polls, pretty much all year, have been delivering a result for Rudd which is similar to the 56 per cent of the two party preferred vote achieved by Malcolm Fraser in that watershed year (1975) after so much economic and political turmoil.

In the end, the ALP 'only' got a national swing of 5.44% for a two-party preferred share of 52.7% and 23 additional seats. A long way short of 1975 but a long off being nail-bitingly close too. When the swing is on (as it was throughout last year), local campaigns don't change the overall outcome.

Comments

[William Bowe]

But wasn't your rerun-of-1975 prediction as far out as Peter van Onselen and the like (albeit in the right direction)?

[Trevor Cook]

I didn't predict it would be close and it wasn't. It certainly wasn't seat by seat.

[Trevor Cook]

Direction matters a lot in elections