Here’s my theory... it’s a good one

One of my most secret items of clothing is not at all what you might be thinking.

It’s a t-shirt I’ve never worn. Emblazoned across it is from the front page of the Herald Sun newspaper with the headline, ‘Hewson in a landslide!’ with a picture of a smiling Mr and Mrs John Hewson to boot.

The problem is, of course, that John Hewson lost that ‘unloseable’ election in 1993.

The front page was from the paper’s early edition, which of course had to be withdrawn and re-printed.

So how did the media and the pollsters get it so wrong – again?

I’m sure I’ve shared this theory before, but it’s a good one.

Pollster Roy Morgan once said in an

interview I did with him probably 30 years ago – ‘Governments don’t win elections, they only lose’.

If you apply that theory, ‘Scomo and Co’ hadn’t done enough wrong to get the drubbing everyone thought they would.

Sure, there’d been leadership instability, but it’s always been thus.

I once had former Liberal Party president Michael Kroger walk out of an interview after refusing to answer if John Howard was likely to challenge Andrew Peacock for the Liberal leadership. History just keeps repeating itself.

I also read that a mathematician thought the polls making the wrong call was easy to explain.

Firstly, it’s very difficult to get a representative sample because so few people have a landline. Just finding someone who’ll answer a phone and talk voting intentions is easier said than done.

Also, the margin of error of the polls was about the difference between a win and a loss for Labor.

I’m guessing pollsters weren’t as subjective as they might have been in reporting their results.

It would also be that, with everyone claiming Labor would romp it in, those conservative voters who’d publicly said they were disillusioned with the leadership squabbles had second thoughts as they went to mark their ballot papers.

The little voice in blue or green resonated louder than the voice of red that they used to think lived under the bed.

Water, and more specifically the Murray Darling Basin Plan, was considered a key issue in regional seats.

Labor’s answer was to favour the environment and lift the cap on water buybacks.

The Coalition announced it would have the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigate water market transparency.

I have my doubts that will achieve much.

The ACCC investigation in milk price discounting did nothing to appease the situation for dairy farmers, and the ACCC already has a key role in water.

For the past decade it’s produced an annual ‘water monitoring’ report which its website says, ‘provides information on regulated water charges, transformation arrangements, termination of network access, compliance with the Commonwealth Water Market and Water Charge Rules, and related issues’.

There have been scores of investigations into the plan.

What might make a substantial difference is if the government adopts the recommendation of the Productivity Commission report and splits the Murray Darling Basin Authority in two: the water manager and a quite separate water regulator.