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One of the only surviving Liberal members admits he knew from the middle of last year the party would be in serious trouble when WA voters went to the polls.

At this stage the party has only secured two seats in the lower house, and might retain a third.

Member for Cottesloe David Honey told 6PRs Liam Bartlett he conducted his own polling last June.

I knew this was a tough election, the toughest election we will ever have faced, he said.

I knew from the middle of last year that we were in the most serious trouble.

He also admitted the partys green energy policy received mixed feedback.

There was a campaign committee, that campaign committee decided what the policies were, he said.

There is no doubt whatsoever that renewables are the future for a new industry in the state.

In terms of going for a hard stop on collie, it was my personal view that, that was not a politically wise move to do.

Mr Honey said once counting is complete the party will meet to decide on a leader between him and Member for Vasse Libby Mettam.

He said discussions will also be conducted with the National party to form a coalition party.

Whatever happens we will be working hand in hand to keep the government to account.

Nationals Leader Mia Davies also wouldnt speculate on whether the party will bail out the Liberals and form a coalition, until all votes are counted.

We need to make sure we know who is sitting in each party room before we make decisions like that, she said.

But both of us are very clear on the fact that we need to find a way to hold the government to account.

Click play to hear the full interviews.

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David Honey admits Liberal party was in 'serious trouble' last year - 6PR

Californias in tough shape: Weve got our own dangerous virus variant, homelessness appears uncontrollable, and the governor may soon face a recall election.

That can only mean one thing: time for establishment media to once again declare the death of The California Dream.

Its happened every downturn since the end of the Gold Rush, but these new eulogies have a fresh twist: The dream this time has apparently been ruined by an excess of liberalism. Big government projects and over-regulation are to blame for the shattering of an illusion.

Without question, California sometimes suffers vertigo from tilting too far left; the San Francisco Board of Educations crusade to rename schools is one handy example. Small business owners here can rattle off a long list of frustrations about government micro-management.

But this is also a state where voters last November overwhelming rejected progressive ballot measures to end bail, restore affirmative action, strengthen rent control, and hike taxes on commercial property.

Rather than liberalism, California is the victim of something quite different: high tech and the rough economic beast it calls creative destruction. A generation ago, Silicon Valley was heralded as the states salvation, but has instead constructed a winner-take-all world of the super-rich serviced by gig workers who face anxiety and uncertainty with every sunrise.

When most East Coast-based media speak of the California Dream, they really have one particular era in mind: the post-World War II boom. Between 1940 and 1950, the states population grew by 53 percent; from 1950 to 1960, another 49 percent.

Families moved here not just because of the Beach Boys; they were drawn by an explosion of Cold War jobs in aerospace and other defense industries. FHA loans and the GI Bill enabled those workers to build homes, buy cars, and send their kids to well-run public schools.

But when the Berlin Wall collapsed, so did that defense-based economy. By the early 1990s, more than 200,000 industrial jobs were lost in Southern California alone. Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Calif) told the Washington Post, The truth is we were not prepared for peace in the world.

Years of anger and despair followed: high unemployment, gang violence, and riots. Mother Nature didnt help: earthquakes, fires and floods ravaged wide sections of the state. California in the 90s felt like it was going through a nervous breakdown.

But, amid all this, green shoots appeared south of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. Computer engineers and technology innovators there envisioned a brave new world of unlimited access to information, instant connection across the globe, and bold choices for workers and industry.

Dreams of a second post-war-style boom blossomed.

Three decades later, changes in our everyday lives are significant from online banking to iPhones. But the working world Big Tech has created is very different from the broad prosperity shared by defense and aerospace working families. A relative handful of people have made a lot of money the kind of money not even Gold Rush barons could dream of. And then theres everybody else.

By the end of 2018, for example, wages were actually down even in Silicon Valley for everyone outside the top ten percent. Those decreases were driven in part by outsourcing and by the downward wage pressure of a low-paid gig economy created by the likes of Uber, Doordash, Task Rabbit, and Instacart.

At the same time, high techs steady stream of newly-minted millionaires and billionaires helped drive up property values throughout the state contributing substantially to Californias always-difficult homeless problem. It got so bad in Silicon Valley that the San Jose school district came up with a plan to turn unused schools into housing for teachers who otherwise couldnt afford to live anywhere near their students.

Several California born-and-bred technology companies are now predictably moving out of the state, escaping the uncomfortable issues they helped create. Oracle and Hewlett-Packard are heading for Texas, others to Florida places where workers can actually buy a house and where corporations can dream of what a Hewlett-Packard spokesperson termed opportunities for long-term cost savings.

Yes, the California Dream is having a fragile moment. To find the biggest culprit, dont point at liberalism. Media should instead examine an industry that began with real promise but soon evolved into a brutal form of creative destruction. That disruption has compelled too many descendants of Cold War workers to make ends meet by standing in line or running up and down supermarket aisles, so better-off people dont have to.

Years ago, Facebooks Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot ZuckerbergFacebook touts benefits of personalized ads in new campaign Mellman: White working-class politics Hillicon Valley: Companies urge action at SolarWinds hearing | Facebook lifts Australian news ban | Biden to take action against Russia in 'weeks' MORE adopted a motto for his then-rapidly-growing start-up words that were soon embraced by others as a high tech creed: Move fast and break things.

Thats just whats been done to many dreams, California and otherwise.

Joe Ferullo is an award-winning media executive, producer and journalist and former executive vice president of programming for CBS Television Distribution. He was a news executive for NBC, a writer-producer for Dateline NBC, and worked for ABC News. Follow him on Twitter@ironworker1.

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Who killed the California Dream? If you think it was liberals, think again | TheHill - The Hill

Are conservatives more afraid of threats than liberals? Political psychologists have long found evidence that people on the right are more sensitive to scary stuff, on average, than people on the left, a basic psychological difference thought to drive some political disagreements between the two groups.

But new research suggests that's overly simplistic.

In a new international study, conservatives and liberals both responded to threats but they responded more strongly to different kinds of threats. And to make matters more complex, those responses don't always map nicely onto the political divide, or stay consistent from nation to nation.

Related: Why did the Democratic and Republican parties switch platforms?

"This link between threat and conservative beliefs, or conservative ideology, is just not simple," said study leader Mark Brandt, a psychology professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. "It depends on a lot of different things. It depends on the type of threats that we study; it depends on how we measure political beliefs and what kind of political beliefs that we measure; and it depends on the precise country that we're looking at."

Let's rewind to 2012, well before the 2016 election and the dramatic political fallout that's happened since. That year, psychologists reported that conservatives responded more strongly to scary images than liberals did on a basic biological level: They literally started sweating more. This tracked with earlier research suggesting that conservatives were more prone to disgust, on average, than liberals. Multiple studies reached similar conclusions.

It made for a neat story. People physiologically prone to fear and disgust would pay more attention to threats and thus turn to a conservative political ideology that promises safety and the status quo. But there was a lingering problem. Seventy-five percent of the research cited on the topic in one influential 2003 meta-analysis was done in the United States, and only 4% was conducted outside of Western democracies. Another problem? The definition of "threat" in most studies on the topic was usually narrow, focused on threats of violence or terrorism. Political persuasion was often defined narrowly too, without accounting for differences between social ideology and economic ideology.

"Many of the studies cited in support of this conclusion use threat measures or manipulations that exclusively tap threats emphasized by conservative elites," said Ariel Malka, a political psychologist at Yeshiva University who was not involved in the new study, referring to politicians and media figures.

This is a problem because the link between threats and politics can run both ways. For example, a recent POLITICO poll found that 70% of Republicans thought the 2020 election was marred by fraud, compared with only 10% of Democrats. Before the election, only 35% of Republicans thought the election would be fraudulent, and 52% of Democrats did. The post-election shift makes it pretty clear that people's fears of fraud are driven by party affiliation and messaging from party elites, not the other way around. If studies on threats focus on fears usually emphasized by conservatives, they're likely to find a connection between threat and conservatism.

Brandt and his colleagues wanted to broaden the scope. They turned to a dataset called the World Values Survey, which asked people from 56 different countries and territories about their perceptions of six different categories of threats, including war, violence, police violence, economics, poverty and government surveillance. Economic threats were broad-based worries about the job market and availability of education; poverty threats were more personal concerns about being able to put food on the table or pay for medical care. The survey also captured people's political beliefs in nuanced ways, ranging from whether they called themselves conservative or liberal to their individual opinions on immigration, government ownership of industry and abortion. Data on 60,378 participants was collected between 2010 and 2014.

The results were messy.

Economic fears were slightly associated with some left-wing beliefs, but not all. For example, a fear of personal poverty was linked with more acceptance of government ownership of industry, but fears about the wider economy weren't. The fear of war or terrorism was sometimes associated with right-wing beliefs, but reporting worries about violence within one's neighborhood was associated with left-wing beliefs, as was fear of police violence.

Related: How to actually stop police brutality, according to science

And there were many unexpected findings. The threat of war or terrorism was linked to left-wing beliefs on government ownership, for example, and economic worries were linked to left-wing beliefs on social issues. The threat of personal poverty was associated with right-wing views on social issues and on protectionist job policies that would reserve the highest-paid jobs for men and non-immigrants. What was clear was that threats and right-wing beliefs weren't married. There were six statistically significant associations between certain threats and conservative beliefs, nine associations between other threats and liberal beliefs, and 15 potential relationships between threat and belief that didn't turn out to correlate at all.

Making matters more complicated, the relationships between ideology and threats weren't consistent from nation to nation. For example a fear of war or terrorism was associated with left-wing beliefs in Kazakhstan just as strongly as a fear of war or terrorism was associated with right-wing beliefs in the United States. Likewise, Brandt told Live Science, experiencing the threat of poverty leads to left-wing beliefs in the U.S., but in Pakistan and Egypt, the threat of poverty is linked to right-wing belief.

If you look only at the United States, the researchers report, it's true that right-wing beliefs and a fear of war or terrorism go hand-in-hand. But expanding to other threats shows an inconsistent mix of associations. In other words, even in the U.S., conservatism and a physical sensitivity to threats aren't clearly linked.

It's not clear from the study which comes first, the political belief or the focus on a threat. It's possible that experiencing a particular threat moves people to adopt a certain political belief, but it's also possible, as with voter fraud in the 2020 election, that people adopt a political identity first and focus on specific threats as a result.

The new work is likely to be influential, said Bert Bakker, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam who studies the relationship of personality and political ideology. Bakker was not involved in the current study, but his work has shown that the difference in disgust between conservatives and liberals may also be overstated.

"I am less certain about what we know about this now than I was a couple years ago," Bakker told Live Science.

It's still possible that people gravitate toward political beliefs for deep-seated psychological reasons, Brandt said.

"It's definitely plausible that people experience some threat or some event and then adopt this attitude," he said. "But what 'this attitude' is and the best one to address that threat might be different depending on the particular context."

There may also be other psychological reasons to associate with a political group, Malka noted. People have a social need to fit in, and may adopt attitudes that help them do so. Future research should focus more on how pre-existing political affiliation leads people to focus on different threats, he told Live Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Conservatives aren't more fearful than liberals, study finds - Livescience.com

A painful churning for conservatives and liberals in America - The Federal '; jQuery('.disableanchortag').append(shareButs);});//Trending LimitjQuery(document).ready(function(){ var wp_lm_chk = 0; var wp_lmt_val = 4; jQuery('.wp-lmt-slider .td-ajax-next-page').click(function(){ if(wp_lm_chk > (wp_lmt_val-1)) { jQuery('.wp-lmt-slider .td-ajax-next-page').addClass('ajax-page-disabled'); } else { wp_lm_chk++; } }); jQuery('.wp-lmt-slider .td-ajax-prev-page').click(function(){ if(wp_lm_chk 0) { wp_lm_chk--; } });});//iframe ResizejQuery(document).ready(function(){ var noOfEl = 0; jQuery(".embed_iframe").each(function() { jQuery(this).addClass("iframeno_"+noOfEl); var mobile_width = jQuery(this).attr('mobile-width'); var mobile_height = jQuery(this).attr('mobile-height'); var s_width = jQuery(this).attr('width'); var s_height = jQuery(this).attr('height'); var mStyles = ''; var nStyles = ''; if (typeof mobile_width !== typeof undefined && mobile_width !== false) { mStyles += ' width : ' + mobile_width + ' !important; '; } if (typeof mobile_height !== typeof undefined && mobile_height !== false) { mStyles += ' height : ' + mobile_height + ' !important; '; } if (typeof s_width !== typeof undefined && s_width !== false) { nStyles += ' width : ' + s_width + '; '; } if (typeof s_height !== typeof undefined && s_height !== false) { nStyles += ' height : ' + s_height + '; '; } document.querySelector('style').textContent += "@media screen and (max-width:760px) { .embed_iframe.iframeno_"+noOfEl+" { " + mStyles + " } }"; document.querySelector('style').textContent += ".embed_iframe.iframeno_"+noOfEl+" { " + nStyles + " } "; noOfEl = noOfEl + 1; }); var bbody = document.body, bhtml = document.documentElement;var bheight = Math.max( bbody.scrollHeight, bbody.offsetHeight, bhtml.clientHeight, bhtml.scrollHeight, bhtml.offsetHeight );document.querySelector('style').textContent += ".embed_iframe.kohli { height: " + bheight + "px !important } ";function resizeEmbed(obj) { var mobile_width = jQuery(obj).attr('mobile-width'); var mobile_height = jQuery(obj).attr('mobile-height'); var s_width = jQuery(obj).attr('width'); var s_height = jQuery(obj).attr('height'); var mStyles = ''; var nStyles = ''; if (typeof mobile_width !== typeof undefined && mobile_width !== false) { mStyles += ' width : ' + mobile_width + ' !important; '; } if (typeof mobile_height !== typeof undefined && mobile_height !== false) { mStyles += ' height : ' + mobile_height + ' !important; '; } if (typeof s_width !== typeof undefined && s_width !== false) { nStyles += ' width : ' + s_width + '; '; } if (typeof s_height !== typeof undefined && s_height !== false) { nStyles += ' height : ' + s_height + '; '; } document.querySelector('style').textContent += "@media screen and (max-width:760px) { .embed_iframe { " + mStyles + " } }"; document.querySelector('style').textContent += ".embed_iframe { " + nStyles + " } ";}});if(jQuery('.td-post-category').length > 0) { var catsHLink; jQuery('.td-post-category').each(function() { catsHLink = jQuery(this,'.td-post-category').attr('href'); catsHLink = catsHLink.replace('/category/','/').replace('/states/','/state/').replace('/south/','/').replace('/north/','/').replace('/east/','/').replace('/west/','/'); jQuery(this,'.td-post-category').attr('href',catsHLink); });}var faultlineBread = jQuery('.faultlines-template-default .entry-crumb:eq(1)').attr('href');if(jQuery('.faultlines-template-default .entry-crumb').length > 0) {jQuery('.faultlines-template-default .entry-crumb').attr('href',faultlineBread.replace('faultlines/faultlines','faultlines'));}/* font size increase decrease script */jQuery(function () { jQuery(".font-button").bind("click", function () { var size = parseInt(jQuery('.td-post-content p').css("font-size")); if (jQuery(this).hasClass("plus")) { size = size + 2; } else { size = size - 2; if (size

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A painful churning for conservatives and liberals in America - The Federal

Delays in the delivery of vaccines sapped Canadians' esteem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau but polls suggest there hasn't been a corresponding slippage in support for the Liberal Party he leads.

Not yet, at any rate. Voting intentions often move after other indicators of voter sentiment start to shift. But with recentannouncements aboutmorevaccine shipmentsarriving soon, the Liberals might avoid taking the hit that was coming their way.

As was the case for most governing leaders across the country,Trudeau's popularity soared at the outset of the pandemic. COVID-19's rallying effect tapered off somewhat as the pandemic dragged on, but Trudeau was still polling better at the end of 2020 than he was at the start of it.

News in mid-January that there would be delays in vaccine deliveries, and thatCanada was falling behind ininternational vaccination rankings, coincided with a decline in Trudeau's own personal ratings.

According to a recent survey from the Angus Reid Institute, Trudeau's approval rating has dropped by five points since mid-January to 45 per cent.

Abacus Data found that the share of Canadians saying they have a positive impression of Trudeau fell three points to 36 per cent, while the number of those with a negative impression increased five points to 42 per cent.

The timing probably isn'ta coincidence. Trudeau's repeated assurances that Canada would receive a specific number of vaccines by a specific date put him in danger of over-promising and under-delivering something over which his government had only limited control.

So it isn't surprisingthat after those delays were announced, Abacus reported that the number of Canadians saying that Trudeau has done an excellent or good job procuring vaccines haddropped 15 percentage points.

Lger has also found that public satisfaction with the measures put in place by the federal government to fight COVID-19 has fallen to 56 per cent from 66 per cent before the New Year, while an Ipsos/Global News poll found approval of Trudeau's response to the pandemic down six points from early January to 54 per cent.

Those are some significant drops after what had been a rather steady public opinion environment for Trudeau. But while the Liberals aredown a little, theyhave not seen as much of a shift in their own support.

According to the CBC's Canada Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polling data, Liberal support across the country stands at 34.9 per cent, down just 1.2 percentage points since Jan. 27.

Recent polls have shown an inconsistent trend line.

The most recent Lger survey has the Liberals at 36 per cent, unchanged since mid-January, and ahead of the Conservatives by seven points. Both Abacus and Ipsos have the Liberals dropping three points since January, but still ahead of the Conservatives by one and three points, respectively.

The Angus Reid Institute pegged the Liberals at 34 per cent, down a single point since January but leading the Conservatives by three.

While it'snot a positive trend line for the Liberals, it certainly doesn't look like the bottom is anywhere close to falling out for them.

This isn't the first timewe've seen support for the Liberals proving to be more resilient than support forthe prime minister.

According to polling by Abacus Data, the share of Canadians with a positive view of Trudeau plummeted 11 points in early 2018 around the time of his controversialtrip to India. In the same polls, however, support for theLiberals slipped by just three points.

Trudeau's positive ratings tumbled by 12 points between December 2018 and April 2019 during the SNC-Lavalin affair, but the Liberals only suffered a four-point drop.

This is largely because a party leader's ratings and those of the party he or she leads are only linked to a certain point because even if voters sour on a leader, they need to prefer theoptions available to them before they take their votes elsewhere.

The Conservatives haven't benefited from the Liberals' modest drop. The party currently sits at 30.1 per cent support nationwide in the Poll Tracker down 0.5 points since Jan. 27. Instead, it's the NDP that has picked up some of the Liberals'slack.

Polls suggest Erin O'Toole, who took over as Conservative leader in August, has not made a positive first impression with Canadians.

While Trudeau's personal ratings fell, Abacus found that O'Toole's positive score was unchanged at 20 per cent, while his negatives increased by two points to 30 per cent.

The Angus Reid Institute found just 29 per cent of Canadians holding a favourable view of O'Toole (down three points since January), while his unfavourable rating increased four points to 51 per cent just one point behind Trudeau, who benefits from having higher favourables and fewer undecideds than O'Toole does.

O'Toole's problematic personal ratings make it difficult for the Conservatives to capitalize on Trudeau's own worsening numbers a phenomenonthey've experienced before.

The same thing happened to the previous Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer. Drops in support for the Liberals over the India tripin 2018 and SNC-Lavalin in 2019 did not result in big spikes for the Conservatives in part because Scheerhad problems with his own personal poll numbers.

It's clear that the appeal of the alternatives matters and that voting intentions don't always follow the leader.

According to polling by Abacus Data during the 2019 federal election campaign, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh saw his positive ratings increase by 14 points. But by the end of the campaign, Abacus had the NDP down one point from its pre-campaign standing.

Nevertheless, a leader's declining poll numbers should get parties thinking about whether their own support will be next. Had further vaccine delayscontinued to sap Trudeau's popularity, it's likelythat the Liberals would have started to feel the effects more directly.

Instead, new vaccine shipments are imminent and should put Canada on track to reach its targets by the end of March. Any rise in Canada's international vaccination rankings could correspond with a rise in Trudeau's support.

Indications of a potential rebound might already be emerging. Polling by Morning Consult, an American polling outfit that has been tracking the approval ratings of global leaders, recently reported an uptick in Trudeau's approval rating.

It could be a blip. But after a tough few weeks, there's no doubt Trudeau and the Liberals will be happy for any signal that they've made it through in one piece.

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Trudeau's poll numbers took a hit over vaccine delays but the Liberals escaped the worst - CBC.ca