As the 2007 Australian Federal Election looks more likely to coincide with the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL) finals, the temptation to use sporting metaphors to describe the campaign grows.
The bounce is something that is central to AFL, and increasingly important to the NRL. In the AFL, it refers to how the umpire bounces the ball, either in the centre square after a goal, or after a breakdown in play. In the NRL, the 40/20 rule has meant that how a ball bounces when kicked into the opposition’s end can make the difference between a unique opportunity to get a try through attack in the other team’s quarter and six tackles of defence.
The bounce as a concept as also caught on in the media analysis of voter polling. For much of 2007, a pattern has existed in polling on the Australian Federal Election tat shows the opposition Labor Party 10-15 points ahead of the Liberal-National Party Coalition.
The consistency of this pattern has led many to look for evidence of a ‘bounce’ towards the governing Coalition parties. A bounce would be evidence of a decisive shift in voter sentiment towards the Coalition.
Various versions of the bounce have been offered in the media. They included the May Budget bounce, the intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory bounce, the Federal takeover of the Devonport-Mersey Hospital bounce, the Kevin-Rudd-in-a-strip-club bounce, and, most recently, the APEC Summit bounce.
The bounce does not appear to have happened. Polls continue to show the two-party preferred difference between Labor and the Coalition as being where it was before the September APEC Summit in Sydney.
This is not surprising. The idea that a gathering of international leaders in Sydney has a lasting impact upon voters in key marginal seats such as Lindsay (NSW), Longman (QLD), Hindmarsh (SA), Bass (TAS), and Hasluck (WA) has always been fanciful.
Don Watson, in his 2002 book, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Biography of Paul Keating PM, documents how his own staff had come to believe by early 1996 that signing a security treaty with Indonesia could provide a bounce for Keating in the forthcoming election with John Howard.
They were wrong. In so far as Australian voters in key electorates thought about Indonesia, they did so through suspicions about President Suharto that turned out to be well-founded.
As voters in Australia’s marginal seats think about APEC at all, they are as likely to remember the Chaser team breaking the security cordon, or perhaps the dark Drizabones, as they are to remember new initiatives on climate change.
The nature of the bounce is also that it is unpredictable. George W. Bush was a staunch supporter of John Howard at APEC, but this did not prevent him from confusing APEC with OPEC, or Australia with Austria, in his key public address. Kevin Rudd also read the bounce well in choosing to present a part of his speech in Mandarin, earning high plaudits from the very powerful Chinese delegation.
The problem with using terms like ‘APEC bounce’ is that it reflects laziness towards the voters themselves. Just like ‘honeymoon period’ or ‘leadership boost’, these phrases are too often the shorthand for real grassroots electoral analysis that would provide a more grounded understanding of where Australia’s voters are at.
Terry Flew is Head of Postgraduate Studies in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He is also a researcher involved with the youdecide2007.org project.
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