Morgan: 59-41

The latest Morgan face-to-face survey, combining polling conducted over the previous two weekends, shows Labor’s two-party lead down slightly to 59-41 from 61-39 in the previous survey. Their primary vote is down 3.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent, but the Coalition is up only 1 per cent to 35 per cent. The balance has gone to Family First and independent/others.

The Courier-Mail also reports on a Newspoll survey conducted for Griffith University’s Federalism Project showing “almost one in five” believe the states should be abolished, and “only one in three people in Queensland wants the status quo of federal, state and local government to remain”. More from Griffith University’s Socio-Legal Research Centre.

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.

285 comments on “Morgan: 59-41”

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  1. So this is the narrowing. ! I’d hate to see it if the govt ever their act together.

    Brendan is goooooooooooone. !

  2. “only one in three people in Queensland wants the status quo of federal, state and local government to remain”.
    Unless I have my math wrong that means 2 thirds want it to stay. Hmm, 66%, that’s a pretty healthy majority.

  3. Well, I’ve been criticising Rudd over the past few days for not being inspirational enough, and I stick to that. I think a good dose of optimistic rhetoric on how we can lead the world in new technology and good example is preferable to defending charges that we are mugs who should always follow our masters and not jump too soon.

    On the other hand, Nelson is showing the downside of thinking out loud. Every half a day now his ETS laughingly-called “policy” changes, depending on who he thinks is his target audience. He’s been doing this for a while now, and it’s what nearly brought him down on The Apology and Work Choices: trying to be all things to all people, all the time.

    There’s a yawning gap on the blind side here (sorry, can’t resist another sporting analogy) for Rudd to run the full length of the field and score under the posts. He should turn defense into attack and challenge the country to come along with him on the Great Quest for a better Australia and a better world.

    In the meantime I expect Nelson to be still standing there mouth agape trying to figure out why defending all positions on the field hasn’t worked.

    Thing is, Nelson is making Rudd’s not so good performance look very good indeed. Rudd could be trying a lot harder, and might have been forced to if Nelson had half a clue.

    In a case of Policy Wonk meets Out-And-Out Dickhead, I guess the Wonk wins, but not by as much as he should be winning.

    One day the Libs will get their act together and the run won’t be so easy for Rudd. He’s not a natural orator, and some good old fashioned oratory is needed in the current situation to blast the cobwebs away from the mind-numbing, sleep-inducing mire he has allowed this debate to become.

  4. I went for my regular trip to the Vampires today – Queensland Medical Labs. To have a arm full of blood taken for tests.

    They have a new poster in the waiting room – A donation of $27,600 to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions caused by their courier fleet.

    What an ETS will do is make all businesses look at how much carbon they produce and force them to do what many companies are already doing voluntarily.

  5. We plant trees, native to our region.
    Planted about 15,000 in the last ten years or so.
    About 1,500-2,000 are growing well.
    Last year we planted 457 [we actually counted them].
    They ALL died. Bloody drought.
    So if someone wants to pay us to plant trees we will happily take their money.
    But we will also need money for water to hand water them through their first year, we haven’t got enough for ourselves much less trees cos we live on the Murray and our water source has disappeared.
    Any offers?

  6. Nelson is really starting to loose the plot, and not just on ETS. I’m starting to wonder if his problem is too many alcopops or not enough! 😉

    Mind you, he’s not the only one in the Liberal Party acting funny ATM. These are strange days indeed!

  7. MayoFeral

    It is the delayed shock starting to manifest itself. They are only just getting to the end of the initial denial phase, and are starting to finally understand that it wasn’t a mistake, the electorate really meant it, and that they not going to have serious shot at winning until at least 2013, maybe longer.

  8. fred

    Sorry for your situation but the answer is to plant trees where it rains. 🙁

    Coastal Nth NSW and SE Qld, Northern QLD. For a start.

  9. Bushfire Bill @ 12 –

    Well, I’ve been criticising Rudd over the past few days for not being inspirational enough, and I stick to that. I think a good dose of optimistic rhetoric on how we can lead the world in new technology and good example is preferable to defending charges that we are mugs who should always follow our masters and not jump too soon.

    Couldn’t agree more.

    I’ve posted a few times about how much we’ve already lost by not getting serious about this. The 58,000 Germans building a huge and very profitable solar industry on our PV technology, China’s equivalent of Bill Gates who’s making his billions also on our technology in China instead of here, his preferred option, because the Howard government and business weren’t interested in risking a few million to commercialise the product of Aussie brains.

    And today another case. A company that couldn’t get funding here to automate the manufacture of solar collectors for large scale solar farms which has moved to the US, where people are aware of the mess we’re in and are willing to do something about it even in economically hard times. They will no doubt make a fortune in the process.

    Meanwhile we just keep doing the only thing the Lib think we’re capable of: digging bloody great big holes. 🙁

  10. ruawake@19
    or spend the money put aside for the water buyback and actually buy it back – problem with over-allocation is that eventually everybody uses their allocation…

  11. Bushfire Bill — I’d like to see the big inspirational speech too, but surely half of the problem at the moment is a national media intent on bringing him down. Hard to get the happys happening when Rupert’s team has decided to attack everything the govt does. Look at how they report the latest Morgan that is the subject of this post Spun for maximum damage:
    http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,24003942-31037,00.html

    We are ill-served by our national media.

  12. Surely Turnball has had enough and will challenge Nelson soon?
    Yes, I know the Liberals with Malcolm as leader will be a much more formidable opposition, but anything is better than the current farce of the idiot from Bradfield being propped up by a bunch of right wing dingbats.

  13. I listened to Coastal Conversations on ABC Coast FM today Holt was interviewed for an hour.

    No he will not stand for Higgins. 🙂

  14. It’s amazing isn’t it? The MSM don’t want to know Morgan until it can use the result to hit Labor over the head with.

  15. Rudd’s hard sell is yet to come on the ETS. Why bother until the necessary reports are in? For heaven sake give the guy a break.

  16. GB

    Exactly – Rudd has said this is what we are doing – Garnaut Draft – Green Paper – Garnaut Final – White Paper.

    At each stage Brenda will give himself a wedgie, trying to sooth the sceptics and worry the crap out of his perceived support base.

    Rudd is doing Brenda slowly and its pretty to watch. 😛

  17. Gary: only the MSM would use a 59-41 poll lead to bash Rudd with, they are shameless barrackers for the Liberal Party.

  18. With figures like these I think the ALP should talk Nicole Cornes into having a go at Mayo. Brendan Nelson can campaign on his emissions trading backdown or perhaps he’ll support a first strike against Iran. The Iraq policy was such a success when he was Defence Minister..

  19. All this chatter rather concerns me as to the quality of the examiners in the higher education world.
    We seem to have produced a batches of high quality twits over a long period of time.
    *Doctor* Nelson makes me concerned each time I need to visit a medico. The man displays an incredible lack of reasoning ability. So fixed in his ideas of how the world ought to be that he is quite unable to see what is actually happening around him.
    The millionaire idiot savant who claims to be the opposition’s financial whiz seems to believe that, like the disastrous duo who held the reins before him, that all things important revolve around the manipulation of money.
    As for the rat-faced papal apologist who pretends to know what’s best for everybody and everything, he has yet to convince me that he has even the slightest grasp of what really goes on in the everyday world.
    None of them seems to have grasped the nettle and accepted that people resoundingly rejected the adage “Better the devil you know…” in the last election.
    There’s no need for the incumbents in government to waste energy on discrediting the ‘opposition’ as they are doing it to themselves quite successfully.
    No, I think that they’re handing the next election to the Ruddy mob on a silver platter, ably assisted by the least publicly aware bunch of commentators that the news media have ever produced.
    Sorry if I sound a little bitter, but I feel that the continually emerging evidence of the severe problems presently confronting humanity requires much more mature behaviour than that being demonstrated by the opposition.
    We are so much in need of a determined omnipartisan approach to the looming calamity that perhaps putting the country into a “State of Emergency”, as might be done in the case of a threat of foreign aggression, may be the only solution.

  20. The News. Ltd. gaggle of pundits will be grateful that our nation’s collective body (mid-year school Hols) and soul (Catholic WYD) are distracted from this latest polling disproof of an imminent collapse in Team Rudd’s electoral appeal.

    Of course, Milne, Piers, Bolt and their ilk will continue to strive mightily to wreak a propanganda pox upon the Rudd Government, but not even a rousing fictional hatchet job from their right-wing mates at Working Dog Media (“The Hollowmen”, Wednesdays, 9:30pm, ABC1) will turn the electorate against Rudd until he brings forth an egregrious stuff-up in the magnitude of Iraq, AWD Bribes, and WorkChoices.

    As a couple of Rudd’s ministers are prime candidates for the “Downer League” of possessing a natural proclivity for blunders, then the PM’s reputedly obsessive-compulsive micro-management might well be the character flaw which averts tragedy and makes him a dead-cert to win a second term.

  21. “The Federal Government will spend $5 million upgrading a breastfeeding advice hotline to a 24-hour toll-free service.

    The funding was part of an election promise to improve breastfeeding support services for mothers.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/11/2301409.htm?section=justin

    This is an example of the little things, that hardly get reported, that the Govt. is doing. Bit by bit doing things that help.

    Autism, tissue donations etc. These little things all add up.

  22. “Rudd’s hard sell is yet to come on the ETS. Why bother until the necessary reports are in? For heaven sake give the guy a break.”

    Obviously some bludgers expect him to be god.

  23. It’s a pretty good effort for Labor to be still so strong in the polls with lots of bad economic signs around. It just shows how important employment is – people will cope with rising food, mortgage, rent and petrol prices if they’ve still got a job.

    There was an interesting interview with Hugh Mackay on the 7.30 report a couple of weeks ago, where he said his focus groups were suggesting that there’s more goodwill than Labor probably thinks from the public, to do something drastic about climate change. But he warned that the window of opportunity mightn’t last too long if the government didn’t act now. The release of the Garnaut report and the CSIRO report on “more droughts, more often” is a good start to raise the awareness, but more needs to be done quickly.

    The Opposition has no idea. The Liberals operate as an anti-Labor party, and aren’t particularly good at developing policy of their own. Turnbull’s problem is that he generally supportsLabor’s policy on things like petrol and climate change – he should have joined the ALP years ago when he had the chance. Consequently, he can’t get support from the anti-ALP side of his party, and, if he becomes leader, will always have people undermining him.

    And – changing the subject a bit – what’s with the CSIRO lately? They seem to be releasing a new study every second day about climate change/drought/petrol. Are they worried Rudd will cut their funding if they don’t pull their finger out? Most of the reports have been interesting, though to paint the “worst case scenario” as $8 a litre for oil is overly alarmist. There’s a whole lot of oil in Iraq just waiting to be pumped out, when the price gets high enough to ustify the effort.

  24. According to Ten News Perth, Tomorrow’s Westpoll will reveal that only 12% of those surveyed think that Troy Buswell will make a better Premier than Alan Carpenter, down from 18%

    Methinks the WA Shadow Cabinet will be holding their meetings in a phone booth 🙂

  25. It’s so easy to be critical. The PM’s performance to date has been outstanding. You give me a newspaper column and I will guarantee you the Liberals won’t even be in opposition after the next election.

    If you want supernatural perfection, I suggest you vote for the pope. Apparently he is due here very shortly.

  26. though to paint the “worst case scenario” as $8 a litre for oil is overly alarmist.

    Wouldn’t bet on it.

    There’s a whole lot of oil in Iraq just waiting to be pumped out, when the price gets high enough to ustify the effort.

    There are also an awful lot more people in the world who are bidding for it than 10 years ago, and a much keener awareness of how finite and precious it is.

    And I am not certain that it is low price holding back the Iraq oil flow.

  27. How could anyone vote for Troy Buswell? It defies belief he is still WA Liberal Leader. Carpenter will win that election in a canter.

  28. [How could anyone vote for Troy Buswell? ]

    People who take what’s written in The West, The Sunday Times and what’s said on 6PR as Gospel 🙁

  29. Perhaps (45) there should be an investigation to identify these people. Maybe pyschiatric intervention could be ordered too?

  30. ” …..though to paint the “worst case scenario” as $8 a litre for oil is overly alarmist.”

    Jeez haven’t we short memories.
    I can remember a columnist being ridiculed for suggesting that bangwater could get to (wait for it…) a (One = 1) dollar a *gallon*.
    But then I’m old and crusty 😉

  31. Am I too sceptical or does Bush ratchet up the tension every time the oil price shows a sign of weakening. This week saw encouraging signs in the barrel price, then hey presto, suddenly Iran are back on the front pages and up the oil price goes again. Every time this crooked family are in power oil goes through the roof, what a friggin disaster they are!

  32. Rolly @ 33, “As for the rat-faced papal apologist”. Jeez, what a classic, sums him up so so well, ROTFL.

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