‘Twas the night before Newspoll, and a new open thread was stirring.
Author: William Bowe
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.
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haha Howard to blame for equine flu. Is there anything this man is not responsible for? Next they’ll be tying the outbreak back to WorkChoices.
Greg
Not so much as blaming Howard for everything, unfortunately it is just a sympton of his approach over the years, lazy and unresponsive.
“The Australian Racing Board yesterday produced letters sent to then agriculture minister Warren Truss in 2004 and 2005 confirming its opposition to the quarantine changes, particularly the use of private veterinarians to inspect horses coming into the country.
The letters warned the Government an EI outbreak “would close down racing and other horse events for several months, with catastrophic economic consequences”.
I wonder if Piers knew anything about Tomorrows Newspoll. He was looking awfully subdued, one may even say defeated on the insiders yesterday. 57-43 ALP – although these prediction pretty much change with my mood.
The question is whether the latest Galaxy and Phone Morgan polls were early indicators of a broad flattening of the coalitions slow improvement with the Morgan Face To Face pool being off the mark. Or were Galaxy and Morgan Phone just a couple statistical bobbles that accidently agreed?
I’m inclined to the later view and so most likley it’ll be 55/45 or 55.5/44.5.
Watch ABC News at 7PM – they usually give a hint of the next day’s newspoll.
Woohoo: it’s APEC week in Sydney. I can barely contain my excitement: the wall is up, Bush arrives tomorrow night, can it get any better than this? (note the sarcasm LOL).
On a good note: the Swans kicked Hawthorn’s arse yesterday!
As long as a certain team of drug cheats doesn’t win, I’ll be content.
ALP 52/48 COAL
55/45 which means anywhere from 52/48 to 58/42.
and howard hater – go those eagles who will probably meet those swans next week!
Two words: Des Corcoran.
LOL
Did anyone see the love-fest on KerriAnne?
Howard called Maxine McKew ‘an exercise in celebrity’
(or was it an experiment, forgot already) and managed to slip in a remark about her campaign being union-funded.
55/45 to ALP. That’s where the polls are stuck. Expect half the Libs to lash out and half to get more focussed on their post-politics careers.
BTW, great reactions when out leafleting for Maxine on Sunday. It’s her they are voting for as much as for the ALP or against the government. Howard is gone. And I always preferred Gordon to Tony.
Michael Proud: the Swans have to get over Collingwood first(not a given) before we start talking about any clash with West Coast.
Will APEC be a plus or a negative for Howard? I doubt it’ll win him many votes from inconvenienced Sydneysiders, and Bush is universally despised in Australia, so the Rodent would be advised to steer clear of him when possible.
With a looming ALP landslide in South Australia, and Port Adelaide with a home final, things are looking pretty good …
My prediction: 54.5 to 45.5
“55/45 which means anywhere from 52/48 to 58/42.”
Mr Proud nails it. Some of us are looking to Newspoll to tell us which way the trend is going, after Galaxy and Morgan have been bouncing around. But of course Newspoll may be just as bouncy bouncy. It’s a roller coaster, but mostly a fun one, so far.
The formidable Pru Goward tips Dec 1 for the poll date, fwiw.
Bennelong Resident, I presume Maxine has an army of volunteers. I offered to help a few months back as I speak a smattering of Asian languages, she did respond that she has to be preselected first but haven’t heard from her since. I was involved in the Not Happy John campaign. I think the Asian vote is critical in Bennelong. Rudd needs his son-in-law to help out.
I wonder whether there is any precedent for movements in the betting markets in the days prior to poll data being released (presumably as “insiders” attempt to lock in good odds prior to poll data coming out)?
labor 55 , libs 45
Let’s see, the APEC has landed and 75% of New South Welshpersons think it’s a waste of time & money. Horse flu is galloping across the country upsetting horsey types (predominantly coalition voters?).
Lab 57
Lib 43
My guess following Man of Steel endorsement: Morgan Phone: ALP 57 Lib/Nat 43. Election: ALP 59 Lib/Nat 41.
PMSL. That’s my electorate.
See you have to vote Greens there, otherwise the casual electoral staff wouldn’t earn any money at all…
With the polls still averaging around 55/45 I’d expect newspoll to be in that region as well. But there is a fair range of possibilites.
I think anything higher than 57/43 would set the horses running (wheezing a bit) and could see Howard out of the race at the end of APEC.
56 & 55 to the ALP would be seen as a not much changed result – but with a loud clock ticking away in the background.
54 would have the bookies easing the ALP’s odds a bit.
53 would be greeting with woops of joy from the consevatives and be seen to put the ALP well within striking distance during the campain.
I’m calling the ALP’s primary to drop to the 44 range and a result around 53 for TPP.
Personally i don’t think that the equine flu thing wil help the ALP in any shape or form, nor will it hurt the federal govt.
Arbie Jay #50
Howard was warned by the racing industry about
-Allowing horses into Australia from New Zealand based on their quarantine
-Allowing private vets employed by owners to certify as they may be influenced by their employer.
I have heard no suggestion that the flu came from NZ or that a horse with the flu was released from quarantine because of influence. The only suggestion I have heard is that someone carried the virus with them when they left.
So if the racing industry warned of an outcome but didn’t warn or anticipate the cause, it seems a little unrealistic to expect the government to have.
Howard Hater (55),
“Watch ABC News at 7PM – they usually give a hint of the next day’s newspoll.”
Will do, thanks much for the tip :):):)
“Woohoo: it’s APEC week in Sydney. I can barely contain my excitement: the wall is up, Bush arrives tomorrow night, can it get any better than this? (note the sarcasm LOL).”
I live in the greater Sydney area as well and while I don’t have to get into and out of the CBD for my daily business, I still wish they would just get a life and leave already. We have to get on with the real business, call the bloody election already PLEASE >;-( ……… and on a side note, the walls being put up really do add to the visual beauty of this ciy, what will the first time visitors amongst the APEC crowd think of Sydney when they see that? (my note of sarcasm)
“On a good note: the Swans kicked Hawthorn’s arse yesterday!
As long as a certain team of drug cheats doesn’t win, I’ll be content.”
Oh yes; in spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds :):):). I am a Kangaroos supporter and while we won yesterday, we wouldn’t be in 4th without the Swans help, I am saying my thankyou prayers today :).
Julie
I presume those , including Bush, who call Howard ‘Man of Steel’ have no knowledge of Russian or Russian History. The irony is wonderful.
Nor should 53 be accepted with sighs of angst from ALP barrackers. Most informed (meaning non-wishful thinking) bloggers say Mr. Rudd will win the campaign.
Yikes, I could have proof read my last post. I can only plead crying baby at 3:00 AM.
I meant to go on to say….
If it’s 57/43 (i.e. agrees with Galaxy) expect some serious hand wringing in Government circles. Should be fun. And no, the man of steel endorsement won’t help at all.
Oh, and as for aspirant teams from Sydney and Perth (artificially assisted or not) meeting the Geebungs at the G in September won’t be fun. Those guys are on fire.
Yes, its interesting that a media frame has emerged – with very little historical evidence to support it – that
a. The 2PP inevitably narrows during a campaign
b. Howard is a good campaigner
In the case of this election, some of the crazy big 2PP numbers will drop off, yes, but thats a no-brainer, and a separate issue to whether the polls will close in a meaningful way through the campaign.
Frankly, most of the poll action lately is a “will I/ wont I” from Green/ ALP first pref waverers.
I’ll go with 56/44, I just received my interest rate increase in mail, so residula anger may still be there.
I guess 55:45; but on the public service and delivery bashing above I have to add my two euros worth. You let me pick a team of public servants and you pick a team from big business and I’ll bet on the public service team every time.
There are a number of problems with the public service all of which cost more money to fix, and quite frankly anyone who thinks you can reduce public spending funding and increase service to the public needs to go out a by a massive dose of realilty somewhere.
If you think the private sector already does the business of government better than government there is no hope for you at all, don’t bother with reality you like your little CCI / BCA world of disinformation too much to risk shocking yourself with reality.
1. Public service doesn’t have, and arguably shouldn’t have, the flexibility, the freedom of mateships and deals round the bar. Given as an assumption that government shouldn’t do shoddy round the bar deals, then flexibility is going to cost you more, as does being able to account for the public money.
2. Despite being ‘captured’ by the union movement state labor governments (and I assume the Feds, but I don’t know much about the Feds) don’t pay enough to keep all but a few of the most talented staff. Most find they can earn massively more in the market. Most go earn it. The flip side is you get a few really good guys staying, you get everyone the market wont pickup staying, so in the recruitment merry-go-round unlike most private enterprise you are going to have to keep you dud choices and are almost certain to lose your good choices.
I could go forever but anyone talking of less money into the public sector needs to be talking about services that are currently provided grinding to a halt. The myth of ‘less money’ ‘more service’ is just that a myth.
Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying everything is perfect, far far from it, but I get to spend a lot of my time wandering through the accounts and staff of predominantly private enterprise, and I get to see inside some government and they are not that different; once you take point 1 and 2 above into account.
56/44, Rudd’s hospital and work choices policies he’s bought out since the last newspoll have to be a plus.
Im loving APEC. Its extraordinary how out of touch with voters Howard has become. It’s as though he *actually* believes the following will play well with Australian voters:
– Climate policies without targets. Bahaa!!
– Piccies with global loser and dill GWB. Pffft!
– Sydney harbour fireworks show for visiting dignitaries which excludes the public. (Hi John, we’re called “Australia”, have we met?)
No wonder he’s desperate to focus attention on these allegedly violent protesters.
Lefty E, I’m not sure APEC such a great thing for Howard.
In the last election campain Howard used evently like sending off troops and the Embassy bombing to suck the oxygen out of Latham’s campain and it worked well.
But this time the dynamics are different. Howard is a long way behind and simply occupying the stage is not enough.
This could make Howard go on October 20 to avoid CPI release on October 24.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/inflation-rise-rings-rates-alarm/2007/09/03/1188671836013.html
“Im loving APEC.”
No one living outside of Sydney is going to care about Sydney residents problems with APEC created traffic jams, etc.
The thing about APEC is that it has the potential to be an overall positive for the government. They’ll be able to control the news cycle with all sorts of announcements about how they intend to solve the problems of the world and dominate the nightly news shows with lots of photo opps. The problem for the government is that any high they get from APEC will be small and probably only temporary. Their challenge will be to cement the positive vibes into real votes. The other problem for the government is that it will also give Rudd an opportunity, especially when he meets with Bush.
Expect Howard to announce the election as soon as APEC is over while the eyes of the world’s media are still here.
As many other people have commented previously, I think it is a consequence of the commentariat “fighting the last election”.
Jasmine
I don’t believe I mentioned private enterprise in the public servant service delivery debate. Actually, my direct comparison was other bureaucrats overseas in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where I have been.
Unless you have a system where you can quantify productivity and delivery, it is hard to compare the public and private sectors. Indeed the private sectors might also work better overseas. However, in the private sector, if you are atrocious, eventually it will show on the bottom line and your company as it presently is, will cease to exist. This is patently not true for the public service and is a key point of difference.
The public service exists as an entity on its own, independent of the ruling government of the day and the comments here are true, it has grown, not shrunk under Howard. Compared to our tax revenue as a proportion of GDP we spend more than 90% of other countries on the planet on our bureaucracy, though are down in the 20s & 30s (depending on the survey) on quality of life reviews. Thus our big tax take does not represent value for the citizen dollar.
No one has the appropriate anatomy, however, to take the status quo on. We could have roads, rail and half-decent broadband with the same tax take but we have committees, reviews, submissions and donuts for the coffee breaks.
Come on an election is like the olymipics for political and senior type reporters, it has to be close for them to get there time in the spotlight. If Rudd was polling 90 2 pp they’d still be talking surprise close elections.
I think the Morgan F2F poll was out; there weren’t enough people sampled, and the Labor “expect to win” percent decreased too much. With Galaxy saying 57-43 and Morgan ph saying 60-40, I think Newspoll will be around 57-43.
Sorry GO, I was trying to be impersonal and generalise the debate so it is possible you said none of the things I tackled at all. 🙂
I’m not sure about your bottom line analysis, that is I’m remained convinced there are people in private enterprise who are complete rubbish but who survive through one mechanism or the other. Networks keep a lot of rubbish people going. Neither economically efficient, nor necessary reflected in the bottom line. Equally some people survive in the public sector who shouldn’t, but the public sector also has some good mechanisms to get these people out of the way of good delivery of key services. So if you find your local government has a bizzare project taking up the time of one of its staff, odds are this project is where they are hiding the dead wood. Probably have the word ‘strategic’ in the job title.
I couldn’t comment on the Feds with the same degree of certainty as State and Local. You are right about the tax take, but I question how much of that is going to real public sector; you’d have to be neck deep in the budget papers and lots of inside inf on what the departments were doing to even have a clue.
You raise, indirectly and perhaps without realising it, one of my pet hates / gripes. ‘Grants’ and not to the States, grants to everyone else. They are stupid, they take up huge amounts of everyones time and are based either on marginal electorate politics or a failed assumption that community groups with no obvious income stream and limited resources will be delivering services forever ‘sustainably’ off a one-off $250,000 grant. It is really inefficient silly stuff.
Picking these polls is like interpreting entrails and (as we all know) about as reliable! The curious thing is that the betting stats are showing a steady decline in coalition hopes, while Bryan Palmer’s aggregate:
http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/
..is showing that the coalition might squeeze out a victory if the election were in early December.
Someone, presumably, is wrong. I wonder whom? My money, however, would be with the betting… not the dodgy polls!
#65 – Lindsay Voter
Call Maxine’s office. Things are a bit chaotic with the volunteers, who do include the Asian community.
Also, try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP0S4KmiWCU
Also also, I noticed the in-laws kept out of the publicity shots for Rudd’s daughter’s wedding. Was the husband even in the pictures ???
Kina, re the HowardFacts link, you might have noticed the authorising body at the bottom. That said, the approach seems to work better than having the whole lot carrying dirty great big ALP logos – and it allows separation between the negative campaign (HowardFacts) and the positive one (Kevin07), with the raw policy (most likely to be sited at ALP.org.au) allowed to sit by itself and without distraction.
As for those Batman figures (I’m also a resident of die Darebiner Demokratischerepublik), the complete sweep of 60%+ ALP 2PP booths masks some rather substantial swings towards the Libs in 2004. The largest swing to the blue occurred at the Ruthven booth – although it’s still debated whether that was down to the campaign itself or the presence of Peter ‘Tollroads’ Batchelor on the line during the busiest part of the day.
I have lived in Singapore and I think the whole public sector comparison misses the point – Asian countries have different expectations of indivduals/govenments than us. Families in Singapore provide many more services that in Australia the govt is expected to provide – even in Italy hospital patients are provided with food by family members! Welfare/disability services are non-existent because once again, family members would be expected to provide this. Ex-pats are largely shielded from this aspect of the country.
Hospitals/doctors/drugs are much more expensive than here. The govt, far from being “small”, regulates most aspects of people’s lives in a form of “social engineering” eg only married couples or people over a certain age are allowed to buy govt flats (private flats are very expensive.)
This type of system just would not work here in Australia. We would resent that amount of government interference, and we simply don’t have the family network to provide services that the govt currently provides.
Thanks Bennelong Resident for your youtube link. No, yet to see pictures of Rudd’s son-in-law in the MSM. I had to google to see if he just had an Asian surname or did look Asian.
looks like an october election, with the latest interest rates forcasts, the rodent wont want to be in election mode when the CPI data comes out on oct 24th, he was on telly this morning lauding Bush as an intelligent likeable man and waffling on about how much he likes his friend, that will go down like a lead balloon, we all know how much he likes him– enough to get us into an illigal invasion,Akerman looked decidedly sick on The Outsiders yesterday so he’s not getting any joy from the Morgan poll.
oh btw, i heard a rumour of a confected terrorist scare at APEC to help the rodent along– has anyone else heard it? that was tried re the Indonesia warning scare two months ago and fell flat, then Howard thought he had his Tampa with Haneef, we live in interesting times.
AK
Great point about families and I am aware of it. Indeed, we didn’t have a cloistered expat view, because at one stage our son was in a local hospital and we did feed him.
However, Australia is (thankfully) a melting pot of cultures, and many of us are immigrants with this same attitude. In any case, at no point have I really been talking about declining service provisions. Most Australians that I talk to are oblivious to the amount we don’t get at the coal face for our tax dollar.
When we have state health systems that run admin:hospital staff ratios of 2:1 (this includes management and bureaucrats), something is wrong. Any business run this way would have failed long ago.
There is little reason why we could have the same service provision with far less ambiguity, duplication, overlap and delays in government at most levels and achieve the same outcomes.
If we could swallow this pill, once and for all, we could be competitive in Asia without having to go the barbaric avenue of Work Choices.
Howard has fought five elections. I don’t really recall how he campaigned against Hawke in 1987, but his campaign was in any case wrecked by the Joh for Canberra circus, which resulted from a failure of leadership by him and his close ally Sinclair. In 1996 he made himself a small target and lied through his teeth (GST? Never ever!) and won the campaign since the public was sick of Keating and all he had to do was look modest and safe, which he did. In 1998 and 2001, he was comprehensively outcampaigned by Beazley. In 1998 he almost lost, quite an achievement when you’re a first term PM with a huge majority, and in 2001 he was saved from certain defeat only by 9/11 and Tampa. Even then Beazley brought Labor back from a rout to a respectable loss in a few weeks. In 2004 Howard certainly won the campaign against L*th*m, but then, who wouldn’t have? Even with L*th*m at the helm, Labor got 47% of the 2PV, showing that a lot of people voted Liberal only with reluctance. I have great confidence that if Labor goes into the campaign proper with anything better than 50%, Rudd will win the campaign and thus the election. And I think Howard will be very lucky if the Labor 2PV is below 52% at the start of the campaign – it will probably still be around 54%.
Inflation still rising and interest rates tipped to rise sooner than later. Points to a short election campaign called soon to try to beat the expected rises.
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,22352907-462,00.html
Tom.
i saw wedding pics of Rudd’s son in law so i certainly dont think he’s being hidden, most of the wedding pics were of Rudd leading his daughter in to the church and the happy couple coming out, i cant remember seeing one of Therese at all, like the groom’s parents i would bet she was there though lol.