State Newspolls

Newspoll is keeping up the good work in the post-federal election lull with a series of state polls, today following last week’s Victorian and South Australian polls with a survey showing the Coalition taking a narrow lead in Western Australia. The following charts show how Newspoll has tracked the progress of the Bracks/Brumby, Gallop/Carpenter and Rann governments.

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.

265 comments on “State Newspolls”

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  1. Howard’s sucess in making up ground suggests that incumbent govts have to be in very serious trouble for a long period to lose an election, the WA govt is not in serious trouble. It might be difficult for the Libs to unsit the sitting Labor MPs in Albany and Geraldton despite the redistribution.

  2. 199
    Sorry Ferny Grover but that is the kind of Australian version of whig history that
    was peddled to primary school classes when I was a lad.

    It certainly is simplistic to claim that all federation did was to add a further colonial parliament, but I was not making that claim. My point was that such a view had the equivalent degree of sophistication as the one you put.

    To claim that the constitutional independence of Australia (apart from PC appeals – hardly an insignificant exception in any event) dates from 1901 does not stack up. I do not see that the continued application of the Colonial Laws Validity Act to the Australian parliaments can be regarded as merely symbolic (and if so then symbolic of what?). The failure of Australia to adopt the Statute of Westminster for ten years and the eventual circumstances in which it was adopted strike me as having practical historical significance.

    Remember how Menzies as PM explained Australia’s entry into WW2 to Australians – because Great Britain was at war with Germany so as a consequence was Australia.

    The Constitution of Australia Act was an Act of the Westminster Parliament. However the constitution was framed (and whatever gloss you want to put on the constitutional conventions it was substantially written by a comparatively small group of colonial politicians) it was subject to approval not only by the people of the colonies but by Westminster. (And Westminster did run a very fine comb over it.)

    I am unaware of the background to the British North America Act but I imagine it was similar.

    Westminster generally had no interest in meddling in the internal affairs of British colonies in the 19th c and amiably granted self-government to all of them (as long as they were white) but it did retain its rights to protect imperial interests. The relative lack of interference by Westminster in Australian affairs is explained by the fact that obedient children rarely require discipline. The relative position of the Australian Commonwealth government vis a vis Westminster post-federation was only subtly different to that of the colonial governments prior to federation. From the point of view of Westminster federation was an improvement because it meant that imperial interests could largely be addressed thro’ the one federal government rather than thro’ each of the six state ones.

    Federation was undoubtedly an important event, but its circumstances were romanticised at the time and continue to be so.

  3. In the aftermath of the demise of Bhutto, there’s some interesting analysis highlights the inept and naive assumptions of the Bush administration, not only in Pakistan, but Iraq too. Here’s a para from Salon.com:

    The Bush administration coupled its support for Pakistan’s democratization with an effort to handpick Benazir Bhutto as her country’s democratic “savior.” But we have also seen this (very bad) movie before in the administration’s abortive effort to promote Ahmad Chalabi as the key to “democratizing” and stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. Once again, the Bush administration turned to a Western-educated political exile, the head of a family kleptocracy who had twice shown herself to be an ineffective head of government, to shore up its tattered strategic partnership with Islamabad. Like Chalabi, Bhutto played to all of Washington’s preferences, saying that she would lead a renewed fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida in northwestern Pakistan (notwithstanding the fact that, as prime minister in 1993-95, she authorized extensive Pakistani support for the emerging Taliban movement) and sending messages to Israeli leaders that she would recognize Israel.

    …just how wrong could the neocons be? Remember too that Chalabi was acclaimed because like Bhutto, he realised that the neocon’s main pre-occupation was Israel, so like her, he made all the right noises. So enamoured were they, it was completely overlooked that Chalabi had no credbility within Iraq.

    They just don’t learn a thing, do they?

  4. KR- A trivia question. What do the last two Iraqi PMs Ibrahim Al-Jaafari and Ayad Allawi, have in common with the 2IC of Al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri?

  5. A hint is they have the same thing in common with the Federal leaders of two of the three main political parties in Australia.

  6. All quacks.

    From memory, Allawi was a neurologist, not sure about al-Jaafari, and al Zawahiri was also a quack from a very elite Egyptian family. I could look them up, but hey, that would be cheating.

    Mind you, Allawi and Zawahiri both have very murky pasts, but from memory, al-Jaafari was exiled in Iran for years.

  7. Ah, it’s coming back, Allawi had been a Ba’athist and friend of Saddam in the early days, and is reputed to have bombed a bus of school kids. He fell out with Saddam, fled to the UK, where later, Saddam’s henchman woke him up one night and did their best to butcher him.

    Paul McGeough of the SMH retold a story that when PM of Iraq, Allawi took out his revolver and personally executed some captured ‘insurgents’, a toughman stunt to show he wasn’t a pussy, and Saddam’s equal.

    Problem was that all the exiled Iraqis were distrusted as either CIA operatives (as Allawi had become) or like al-Jaafari, too beholden to the Iranian mullahs.

    The US never got it right, still haven’t.

  8. Diogenes, here’s the best potted history of recent Pakistani politics you’re likely to read, warts and all:

    http://icga.blogspot.com/2008/01/pakistans-power-puzzle.html

    …from Barnett Rubin, who really knows the turf.

    I keep getting the feeling that Washington has so snookered itself on this one that it’s going to take years of a Democrat President to unwind the position of the ‘war on terror’ being a justification for grotesque military rule. And let’s hope that in the meantime, the place does not implode and become a second Iraq.(This time, actually with WMD!)

  9. 207 KR- 100% correct. al Zawahiri was a surgeon and practiced for a while. I don’t think al-Jaafaari ever practised, similar to Che Guevara. The current presidents of Chile, Syria and Uruguay are also doctors, as was Keating’s old mate Mahathir (I should have recognised that arrogant, patronising expression!).

    And on history repeating itself, Voltaire put it best “History never repeats itself, man always does.”

  10. Steve 198 – me a conservative wannabe? FYI, over the past 3 years I have had about 30 letters published in the Oz and the Age criticising Howard and his carpetbaggers. Had one in the Courier Mail last week criticising the Bligh government – share it around as incompetence deserves criticism anywhere. I’m returning to Brisbane for family reasons, Melbourne is a great city but Victoria is currently led by a pretty ordinary government and I hold fears for Victoria’s future irrespective of who is running the place. BTW, isn’t Greensborough one of those suburbs near the arse end of Melbourne?

  11. 189 KR- Here is a huge coincidence given last night’s comments about torture investigations. It will only target the CIA but it might go higher.
    Criminal probe for CIA over torture tapeshttp://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23002239-12377,00.html

  12. OK Diogenes, here’s a quiz question for you:

    What is the connection between the town of Greeley in Colorado and al Qaeda?

  13. There was a Muslim school teacher who went there for a study tour to learn how to improve his countries education system (I think Egypt). He was a pro-Western moderate when he went there and was so disgusted by the consumerism he saw that he became a radical anti-capitalist. Some of his disciples went into al Qaeda.

  14. Alex McDonnel,

    Greensborough is not as nice as Hurstbridge, being under the control of the City of Banyule rather than the Green Wedge Shire of Nillumbik, but it is a pleasant enough place.

    If as you claim, John Brumby ‘is just cooking the books’, please give some evidence on which you base that claim. Perhaps you could let the auditor-general know. Just repeating it in different words does not make it true.

    You apparently have no evidence to contradict any of the facts I presented in support of the Victorian Labor Government’s achievements and have, based on the facts that you do not contradict, concluded that I am a ‘Labor apparatchik’. I will add it to the list of accusations against me, along with the ‘obvious left wing bias’ I was accused of on the Andrew Bolt Forum for correcting another poster’s simple factual error regarding the Heiner Affair.

    Chris Curtis
    (Vice President, Victorian DLP, 1976-78)

  16. 213
    Diogenes

    yep, Sayyib Qutb, major force behind the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and of course, big mentor of Ayman al-Zawahiri. Qutb was aghast at the jitterbugging teenagers, the materialism, and the rampant individualism that was everything that his idea of Islam was not. He went on to be the leading figure in the radical movement and was the seminal anti-Western figure that spawned the violent jihadis we know so well today.

    Greeley has a lot to answer for! Ha!

  18. With the Iowa caucuses imminent, I tried to work out who to barrack for amongst the Republicans. And this helped me no end. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want Guiliani (no surprise there) or McCain (definitely no surprise) but he also doesn’t want Huckabee who he alleges is not a true conservative. Romney and Thompson are his preferred candidates, and given that Thompson is brain-dead I’m sure he’s the one the hard-core neo-cons will want. Romney might have some of his own ideas which could stuff up the neo-cons agenda. So for me its
    McCain>Guiliani>Huckabee>Romney>Thompson.
    http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0108/Rush_Huck_not_a_conservative.html

  19. 217
    Megan

    Just a few nights ago we watched the movie “Bobby” about the younger Kennedy’s assassination, which drove me to check on Sirhan Sirhan, the imputed assassin.

    If you think the first Kennedy death was clouded in mystery, myth, rumour and strangeness, look up the history of what happened that night in the Ambassador Hotel and the subsequent ‘investigation’.

    It is utterly amazing, and of course the movie is a total Hollywood bland-out, but the case was even more convoluted and distorted than any thriller script you could concieve.

    What appeared on one level to be a simple case, deranged Palestinian shoots Robert Kennedy, is almost certainly not true, and the mind-boggling mishandling of the evidence and straight out destruction of vital evidence leaves you with a horrible feeling that the truth was not something that got an airing at the trial.

    1968, it was an incredible year, to be sure.

  21. KR- still remember the brilliant documentary “Hearts and Minds” (1972) -unforgettable insight into all sides of the Vietnam war- and in it Daniel Elsberg broke down at what might have been if Robert Kennedy had not been shot in 1968.
    Wish there were more brave souls like Elsberg, Marchetti and Marks (of “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” fame),etc.- whistleblowers who cut to the facts.

  22. Arty B & Ferny Grover…

    My thoughts…

    On the day that my Great Great Grandfather (born in 1830) arrived in Sydney, after a four month voyage from England, on 16th November 1855, the Sydney Morning Herald carried two main stories… one was about the most recent developments in the Crimean war… the other was about the new NSW Constitution bringing forth Responsible Government.

    My Great Great Grandfather went on to live through the rest of the 19th Century, and until the second year of WW1, in the process seeing various colonies first separate from NSW and then federate with them.

    As a loyalist (6th Gladesville LOL), doubtlessly he would have always regarded himself as a British subject. This would have been the common view at the time, of most of the population, whether Sterling or Currency Lad. To him there would have been no question that he remained a British subject upon Australian federation.

    He would doubtlessly have regarded Australia as an independent nation within the British Empire. The idea that Australia could be an independent nation outside of the British Empire, that is, independent in the sense that the USA was independent, would simply have been ‘a nonsense’ and I doubt that it was a commonly thought of proposition at the time. Nationhood then did not mean the same thing to the populace as nationhood now.

    When his Grandson (my Grandfather) enlisted for service with the AIF in 1915, the enlsitment form asked if (the applicant) was a British (Not Australian) subject, whether by birth or naturalisation. Persons becoming naturalised at the time became British subjects. Even the Attestation papers for WW2 when my father ‘signed up’ still asked if one was a British citizen.

    The idea of a ‘separate’ Australian citizenship did not occur until later. Presumably the date of some Citizenship Act would allow us to identify a particular date, but regardless of that, I think it is correct to say that the idea of Australian Citizenship, like the closely related and intertwined concept of Australian independence was a gradual one.

    In that light I think that the Australian constitution must be regarded as an important STEP in the evolutionary process of nationhood and independence. I can not agree that it is either of little relevance nor the all important and culminating event. Further steps, including various court cases, and the gradual financial and constitutional ascendency of the Commonwealth over the States (hastened by WW2) continued and at times perhaps somewhat transformed the process, which in a sense which can be seen to have begun with federation, or even earlier in our history.

  23. More importantly…

    Best (if slightly belated) wishes to all Poll Bludgers for good health and happiness 2008.

    A special good wish for our host William Bowe, and for the successful progress of his thesis.

  24. Geoffrey Kead,

    It was the Chifley Government which passed the Citizenship Act, in the late 1940s, the stating of which allows me to comment on another of the many myths that are regularly repeated re Australian politics. Aborigines were subjects prior to then and became citizens at the same time as everyone else did with the passage of this Act. The 1967 referendum did not grant citizenship to them, as they already held it. Nor did it – to dispel another myth – give them voting rights, which they also already had.

  27. Diogenes,

    Yes, that is also a myth. I have been attempting to track down the source of that one, with no success whatever. The nearest I have come to its possible origin is a court case involving Aborigines in Queensland under which the Queensland Government argued that it had control of an area of land under the Flora and Fauna Act.

    Steve,

    Wikipedia is wrong, as are otehr encyclopedias. It is confusing the concept of citizenship with that of voting rights. There were no Australian citizens until the Citizenship Act was passed. There were only British subjects, and Aborigines became British subjects legally speaking from the British occupation of Australia. You can argue that they did not have the rights of citizenship when they were excluded from Commonwealth voting. Aborigines voted in Victoria in the constitutional convention elections, in the constitutional referenda and in parliamentary elections. Some Aborigines regained their Commonwealth voting rights sometime in the middle of the century, and all Aborigines had their Commonwealth voting rights restored in 1962. The 1967 referendum had nothing to do with voting rights or citizenship.

    The 1967 referendum did two things: it removed the restriction on the Commonwealth making race-based laws regarding Aborigines (it had always been able to make race-based laws for other peoples), and it determined that Aborigines would be counted in reckoning the population of the country. The reason they had been excluded was that the Constitution provided for the seats in the House of Representatives to be allocated to the states on the basis of population, meaning that the counting of Aborigines would have given more seats to the states with large Aborigine populations, such as Queensland, even though that state would not let them vote, and fewer seats to states with small Aborigine populations such as Victoria which did allow them to vote.

    Then there are various state-based laws; e.g., a WA citizenship act which restricted Aborigines in their citizenship.

    The whole issue is complicated and then falsely simplified, and thus do myths develop; e.g, the myth that John Howard changed the definition of unemployment and the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide.

  28. Quote:

    The whole issue is complicated and then falsely simplified, and thus do myths develop; e.g, the myth that John Howard changed the definition of unemployment and the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide.

    …but is it not true that John Howard caused much unemployment among Liberals and the Federal Party indeed committed the much cited lemming act?

  29. Chris Curtis @ 224 – While Aborigines may have technically become citizens in 1948 with everyone else, they did not have all the rights accorded other citizens. They couldn’t vote in WA election until 1962 and 1965 in Qld, and those in Qld, NT and WA couldn’t vote federally until 1962 (unless they’d served in the ADF). Most also couldn’t claim social security until the late 1950s and in some cases not until 1965.

    Diogenes @ 225 – The “fauna category” only ended with the 1971 census according to John Goldlust at La Trobe University.

    On the wider question of when we became an independant country, when I enlisted in the 1960s I swore an oath to defend, not Australia, but “QEII and her heirs and successors according to law”. Indeed, the word Australia wasn’t mentioned. This only changed relatively recently.

  31. MayoFeral,

    Yes, that’s what I said: ‘You can argue that they did not have the rights of citizenship when they were excluded from Commonwealth voting.’

    Geoffrey Keed,

    Thank you.

    I have some details of the WA Act someone on my computer, but I don’t know where.

  33. 232

    It was a rodent snuff movie! The lemmings were high on powder, hence the ‘white wilderness’ and Walt was in fantasia land.

  34. Diogenes,

    It was actually a river, not the sea:

    ‘The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers did this – wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings’ self-implemented population-density management plan.’
    (‘Lemmings Suicide Myth’)
    http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1081903.htm

    While we are dealing with myths:
    The definition of unemployment as being less than one hour’s work a week has not changed since 1960. Here is the ABS account of unemployment measures: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/RN/2006-07/07rn18.pdf

  35. Yeah, but Disney also tidied up a lot of unpalatable stories. Snow White is actually a story about a runaway that shacked up with a bunch of lusty miners.

    Why didn’t Donald Duck wear pants?

  36. It appears that all Divisions voted in Favour of the ‘Aboriginal’ referendum, with Kalgoorlie in WA and Leichardt and Herbert in QLD having the largest proportion of NO votes.

    Re the ‘Parliament’ referendum, in QLD the Brisbane divisions, as a rule, only narrowly voted against the proposal, but opposition grew markedly the further away from Brisbane that one was. The only QLD division to vote for the proposal was Oxley, so I suppose that that fact can be added to the personages of Bill Hayden and Pauline Hanson when considering the remarkable history of that seat.

    Over 90,000 (about 1.6%) managed to vote INFORMAL in BOTH of the referenda, surely a remarkable achievement for those concerned, considering what little effort was needed to cast a formal vote.

  38. GK @222
    The discussion seems to have moved on since my last visit, so I will leave it by saying that I think you are basically correct. I would say that if you were looking for a definitive moment when Australia left the British Empire it was probably some point between 1941 and 1945. The leaving was not without regret but, as the Empire was shortly to cease to exist whether Australia liked it or not, there was hardly any choice in the matter. The history of Australian foreign policy since can possibly be regarded as the story of a search for a replacement.

  42. Chris – 214. I don’t have the details of the state of Victoria’s finances and neither would the Auditor General. Pollies are good at hiding stuff. Your quoting of a few education figures does not support the true position of Victoria’s finances. Step back and look at the place – where does its income come from? Gambling taxes and Stamp Duty. Melbourne used to be the financial centre of the country but that is changing now. Executive salaries are now higher in Brisbane than Melbourne but less than Sydney. As I said earlier, manufacturing is closing down in Victoria. If Ford or Holden or Toyota decide to move elsewhere, it will be a big problem.

  43. 241
    Megan

    I haven’t seen anything from McGeough for a while, but I did read a bit of Dahr Jamail’s stuff earlier in the war. He was not always agreed with on every detail by Juan Cole (the best English blog on the ME, by the way), but overall he was a fantastic resource on the ground there.

    Thanks for the link, the interview with Jamail is interesting, and especially the way he sees the imperial imperative at work, using all the same historical tricks of divide and conquer. When the whole mad US media thing began to pump up and amplify the crazy neocon notion that Iraq was the most dangerous threat to ‘world peace’ I was convinced that the strategy was to move from Saudia Arabia, (where they’d outstayed their welcome) and shift their permanent bases to Iraq. I called it the ‘changing camels’ strategy at the time.

    Nothing since has changed my opinion.

  44. Iowa caucuses are now in progress and there’s some live C-Span web coverage.

    There’s a blog on the NY Times that’s updating stuff from all around the state.

    Biden’s group is being dissolved as under quota in one caucus precinct that’s on at the moment.

    Another has shown up with Obama,Clinton and Edwards very tight in that order, much as the Des Moines Register poll had predicted.

  45. Biden,Dodd,Richardson and Kucinich all under quota so are going to their second preference at this Des Moines High School caucus on C-Span.

    It’s a really folksy show, very civil and noisy, with lots of cheering and a fair bit of confusion.

    There’s plenty of spruiking and gentle cajoling, and is unlike anything we would ever recognise as a political vote.

    Fascinating.

  46. It’s notable that the crowd is essentially white and middle aged, or what I can see so far.

    The other thing is noted on the NY Times blog, apparently the turnout is HUGE and some Democcrat centres are overflowing.

    Try counting a crowd of people within a crowd of people! They’ve just got 111 for Edwards but think they counted one person twice (the only little old lady!) and have to go out and come in again.

    It is the most bizarre spectacle! And it’s all on a time limit!

  47. Final numbers for this precinct’s Democrat tally:

    Obama 186
    Edwards 116
    Clinton 74

    They calculate delegate numbers from this count.

  48. OK, here’s the delegate count:

    Obama 3
    Edwards 2
    Clinton 1

    This precinct’s 6 delegates are based on population numbers, and each group now gets to elect delegates (plus seconds) to go to the County Conventions in March. Delegates will then be elected to go to State Conventions in April and then on to the national Convention in August.

    Wow, you realy have to be committed to take part in this process.

    Apparently a lot of younger caucus goes have been noted across the state, which is good for Obama, as he’s polled well with the under 30’s.

  50. Obama is pulling ahead statewide.

    42% reporting, delegates are:

    Barack Obama 272 33.5%
    John Edwards 260 32.0%
    Hillary Clinton 259 31.9%

    And Huckabee is killing it:

    Mike Huckabee 7,809 35.0%
    W. Mitt Romney 5,355 24.0%

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