A very interesting piece today in the Australian Financial Review newspaper. Interesting because it is so early in an election year.
But Labor Party strategists organising to defend 25 seats at the Federal election, whenever it's called, and conceding they face a battle to retain 16 in Queensland and New South Wales alone.
Lindsay Tanner is mentioned in the once safe inner city seat of Melbourne. And the story argues that Labor are concerned about the volatility in electorates.
Well may they be in the light of the record of the Rudd Government that is now becoming more apparent to voters.
In America voters continually and comprehensively tried to tell President Obama that the health care bill was unaffordable.
He persisted.
So Massachusetts was an electoral earthquake for the incumbent President. Yet there was Kevin Rudd yesterday taking up to ten minutes in the Parliament to answer questions on an emissions trading scheme which hits at the very economic viability of the country of which he is Prime Minister.
When Tony Abbott talks about it as a gigantic tax to create a gigantic slush fund for the Government, he speaks in language the electorate understands.
The Financial Review story by Marcus Priest, obviously written with some inside information, is arguing that Labor strategists are taking the possibility of an electoral loss seriously.
And talks about the troubled Labor States of Queensland and New South Wales. Lindsay Tanner is one politician in the Rudd Cabinet who is more than happy to deal in personalities rather than policy, and he was at it this week, name-calling both the Opposition Leader and the Shadow Finance Minister to such an extent that he was forced to withdraw comments.
Well, the Greens have now indicated they'll focus their national resources on his seat. The Greens candidate in the last election in the seat of Melbourne got over 45 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.
Talk that figures released by the Australian Electoral Commission reveal payments to the Labor Party have plunged by 63 per cent. Donors are walking away. The Labor Party has 22 seats in the Parliament with a margin of under five per cent.
In the last election, of the seats that Labor picked up, 17 achieved a swing of more than five per cent and four a swing of more than ten per cent.
In this climate of broken promises and an incomprehensible emissions trading tax, Labor justifiably are wondering if they can defend those swings.
Labor now concede they've got a fight on their hands in Queensland holding Dawson around Mackay and Flynn around Gladstone.
Against that it's said that the redistribution has converted four Liberals seats, Swan in Perth, Dickson in Brisbane, Macarthur and Gilmore in New South Wales into nominal Labor seats.
There would be people in the Labor Party reading the tea leaves. If Bob Hawke in 1984 could have a significant swing against him when he called a double dissolution, and if John Howard in 1998 could lose 19 seats, then in this volatile environment with a Prime Minister who increasingly demonstrates he's not on top of the issues, and on many of those issues couldn't seem to care less about what the public think, in that climate the concern of Labor strategists is more than justified.
As one Government Minister is quoted as saying, "Seats right up the pendulum could move. Whatever anyone says, Abbott has had an impact". And that most probably is the guts of it.
