It’s old news by now, but in case anybody missed it, the excellent Bryan Palmer has resumed blogging at ozpolitics. This is a Good Thing ™.
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Bryan Palmer writes:
Now that the election is over, I will be taking a blog holiday for some months.
Months? Months?! C’mon, man; don’t be that guy …
Well, the Australian election is getting pretty damn close now. A few random thoughts:
- Both at an aggregate and at a seat-by-seat level, the betting markets have blown out in favour of a Labor victory.
- There have been plenty of predictions of exactly how many seats Labor will win, but as ever, Bryan Palmer does a superb job of aggregation and analysis.
- We have, as Joshua Gans puts it, “US style election-lawyering” from the Coalition, who have released legal advise suggesting that 13 Labor candidates may be inelligible to stand. I am entirely in agreement with The Possum on this one: “Sour grapes do not play well with the electorate, threatening to bring in lawyers to try and overturn the election result looks bitter. Not accepting the umpires decision, and threatening to take your bat and ball and go home looks pathetic.”
- Andrew Norton has some good work in looking at the reasons why the Coalition are on the nose. His prognosis: expect a long time in opposition. I’m not sure I agree with him, but I can’t really explain why, so I’ll just shut up and direct you to him.
- A friend here in London was voting for somewhere (sorry, I have no clue where) in NSW and thanks to the beauty of the Australian preferential voting system, had to rank One Nation, Family First and Fred Niles. I really don’t know how I’d put them.
I’m still not that interested in general, but these two bits looked interesting in their specifics:
- Looking at Bryan Palmer’s “Day 6 report,” it seems that the betting markets have started moving sharply in favour of the Coalition. Labor is still being billed as the favourites, but it’s narrowing fast.
- Andrew Leigh has looked at the distributional implications of the two parties’ tax policies. The result: Including Labor’s education credit, the Labor policy would be better for 93% of income earners, the same as the Coalition policy for 4% and worse for the top 3% of earners. Andrew’s summary:
* The action is really at the top. The only difference between the Howard and Rudd tax cuts is that Rudd wouldn’t cut tax rates from 45% to 42% for those earning over $180,000. Assuming the same rate of wage growth that we’ve had over past years, only 1.4% of adults in 2010-11 will have an income in that range, while only 3% of families will have an income-earner in that range.
* This means that the richest 1% of families get 7% of the Howard tax cuts, but only 4% of the Rudd tax cuts. The richest 10% get 28% of the Howard tax cuts, but 25% of the Rudd tax cuts.
* The education credit is fairly evenly distributed across the income spectrum (as Labor pointed out on Friday, 2/3rds of families with children are eligible for it). So the Rudd package looks more even – but only a little – if you take account of it.
So, the campaigning has formally begun for the 2007 Federal Election in Australia. I’m interested, but mostly in an abstract sense and at the same time have a definite feeling of “blah” towards the whole thing. When I do end up wanting to know what’s happening, I’m pretty sure that Bryan Palmer will be a superlative aggregator of information that I ought to care about.
I did notice, with a sigh and a rolling of eyeballs at the stereotypes involved, that the two sides are squabbling over the debates: how many to have and when to have them. The Coalition is calling for just one and early in the campaign (before most policies have been released), while Labor wants three spread out over the entire length of the campaign.
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