The great unhinging as predicted

Possum Comitatus has another excellent article The Great Unhinging - Revisited in which he looks at how  qualitative polling in 2006 first identified some of the issues that are now causing dissatisfaction with the current Government. He identifies three threads that came out of that 2006 qualitative polling:

• A growing expectations gap and associated sense of entitlement.
• A growing aversion to complexity.
• A growth in a perception of uncertainty.

These three threads have combined with minority Government and the media to provide Tony Abbott with an ideal platform.

When the 2010 election produced a hung parliament — particularly one where two generally conservative rural independents backed the non-conservative prime ministerial option to form a government — this was uncertainty writ large. The complexity didn’t matter. The public was more predisposed to react against it than it was predisposed to act in support of it, simply because people saw it as yet more uncertainty. Not just a little bit of uncertainty — the biggest chunk of uncertainty the public had experienced in decades.

Thus it was that the more Abbott complained about the minority government and the more Abbott called for a new election — the easiest and most obvious thing for him to do regardless — the more public traction Abbott inevitably gained with these calls. Abbott was seen to be siding with stability, certainty and control — even though he was actually creating most of the uncertainty that was being sheeted home to the minority government. People blamed the government — confirmation bias — because the public had the predisposition to blame the minority government simply because of the uncertain nature of its very existence. With high levels of reactivity being manifest in the public — it was pretty clear to see just which hill this snowball was going to roll down.

Similarly, Abbott was never going to be struggling to find coverage for his attacks now that the media primarily exists to enhance conflict and sensationalise events to generate viewers. With the nosiest sections of News Ltd already firmly in Abbott’s corner and willing to wage war on the new government (let alone News Ltd’s production line of stories blaming the government for issues surrounding the sensitive expectations gap), Abbott could simply feed into the media cycle a constant stream of the very thing he was discovering worked — complaint. The more sensational and hostile the complaint, the greater the level of conflict it would appear as, hence the more coverage it would receive and the more support it would ultimately generate.

What distinguishes Possum Comitatus from other commentators is that he predicted this 18 months ago when the minority Government was first formed.

Recommended reading.