Advance’s tactics in Dunkley herald a new, nastier brand of politics

The Australian right elite is clearly cracking up, and it is delicious to watch. The signs are coming like crows in winter, flying into a fortune teller’s marked-out space of sky. This week was a double-whammy, with the release of two polls showing that, as the headlines noted, Labor’s primary vote had fallen below the Coalition’s. Actually, it had done so in October, as numerous pollsters noted. And buried in the middle of the story (in the Oz), and not mentioned (in Nine), was that the two-party-preferred vote was unchanged at 52-48, a solid lead for Labor.