Or is it more a case of the declining left? Jennifer Curtin looks at the evidence from Saturday's poll The National government’s triumphant win on Saturday, and Labour’s corresponding loss, has broken at least three records, and the pundits are still counting. First, National has won sufficient seats to govern in its own right, a...

There’s a case for encouraging popular but defeated MPs to throw their hats back into the ring The Rudd government lost seventeen House of Representatives seats to the opposition in 2013, and it’s mostly those electorates, now held by the Abbott government, that Labor will have its closest eye on next time. Not surprisingly, they...

When “Howard’s battlers” defected from Labor in 1996, political commentators shifted their focus to Sydney’s western suburbs. But what if the whole idea was founded on a misreading of the data? The spectre of a major political party “losing its base” is popular in political commentary. It’s usually applied to the Labor Party, but in...

Overview: To those in the advertising business, political parties are ‘brands’, like Coke or Pepsi. Whom you choose to vote for is akin to deciding which brand of toothpaste you’ll purchase. Dee Madigan has been in the ad game for 18 years and has worked on 5 ALP election campaigns. She reveals the tricks of...

Labor and the Coalition are caught between vying for the middle ground and differentiating themselves in the political marketplace. Behind it all, there’s one vital difference If a new poll reflects opinion across the electorate then we are in the midst of a disturbing spike in public disaffection with Australian political parties and the political...