Newspoll: 55-45

Newspoll shows Labor maintaining its 55-45 two-party lead from last fortnight. Kevin Rudd has gained a point and Brendan Nelson lost one on the question of preferred leader, Rudd now leading 65 per cent to 14 per cent.

UPDATE: The Australian has not published a graphic this time, but you can read all about it at the Newspoll site. The paper also reports on an Essential Research survey on emissions trading, but we are told only that “58 per cent of Coalition voters believe Australia should take action even if other countries do not”, while “only 25 per cent of the 1700 voters polled believed Australia should act only when other major economies agreed to do so”. The West Australian has also published results on the subject from last week’s Westpoll survey of 400 respondents in WA, showing “two-thirds of the poll’s respondents agree that a carbon trading regime should be introduced according to the Prime Minister’s timetable”. However, 69 per cent believe the US, China and India “would need to adopt their own trading schemes if Kevin Rudd’s plan for an Australian ETS by 2010 was to be effective”, and “47 per cent of respondents were not prepared to pay more for petrol”.

UPDATE 2: Full report from Essential Research here. It includes a 59-41 result on federal voting intention based on two weeks of data, with a 3 per cent shift denoting that the week past was quite a lot better for the Coalition than a fortnight ago. There were also questions on the Catholic Church’s response to child abuse by priests and religious affiliation in general. Results were obtained from a targeted online panel of 1013 respondents.

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.

844 comments on “Newspoll: 55-45”

Comments Page 16 of 17
1 … 15 16 17

  2. 749
    ShowsOn Says:

    Why the ABC lets Bolt on, never letting other guests finish a sentence, and banging on with his utterly ludicrous claims is beyond me…unless it’s to amuse us! LOL

    Talk about an empty vessel. Crabb and Mega run rings around him for both intellect and wit, and he hardly seems to realise what complete prat he makes of himself.

    Talk about thick.

    As for 1998…fine if you don’t put in the previous few decades, and don’t allow for some big variables like el Nina.

    He is a self-promoting flat earther with neither wit nor style, and certainly not intellectual rigour.

  3. 734
    Bushfire Bill Says:

    Horatio Hornet is due for the chop and the courtiers are lining up their champion against Malcolm.

    God, this is going to be fun!

    Come back Peter…fly away Malcolm.

    But flogging a dead horse like Bracket Creep?

    ROFL

  5. 754
    Jen Says:

    All they need is a putsch from the CC deniers, (Andy Bolt can be their mascot! LOL) and it’s all over red rover. They’d fall upon themselves and we’d get to watch.

    Can’t wait for that one.

  7. Careful, I didn’t initially post this:

    [ShowsOn Says:

    Why the ABC lets Bolt on, never letting other guests finish a sentence, and banging on with his utterly ludicrous claims is beyond me…unless it’s to amuse us! LOL]

    But anyway, Bolt has started up a few threads on his blog to attack Annabel Crabb (He hardly let Crabb explain what she thinks). I’ve made a couple of posts to the thread:

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_cool_news_is_finally_being_reported_in_the_age

    The interesting thing I note from the thread is that if you try to argue that the trend of warming continued after 1998, people respond saying climate change isn’t caused by people. If you get some to accept that climate change is caused by people, they say the temperature data is faulty. If some accept that the temperature data is accurate, they claim that the modeling, and thus finding of a trend, is faulty.

    In other words. They are completely inconsistent, they are unwilling to argue a single point at a time, and instead use contradictory evidence to explain the validity of their irrelevant points. Bolt surely must see that he is associated himself with people that have opinions of climate change that even he doesn’t accept.

  8. ShowsON,

    I read through over 400 posts to Andrew Bolt’s Climate Change scepticism article to find almost all of them either from rah rah supporters who see CC – not me, the other one – as some evil socialist plot from those disappointed that communism failed or from those on the other side who couldn’t be bothered with any facts. So, simple question to you or anyone else: where do I look to find a scientific rebuttal of his graphs?

  10. 758
    Chris Curtis

    Try realclimate.org as it’s a blog run by real scientists and is a great site for some very intelligent debate.(Some of it goes over my head, as it should, I’m not a scientist, but it’s easier to follow in other places.)

    They do regular debunks of some of the more egregious misstatements, like Bolt’s 1998 mantra.

    It’s ONLY true if you leave out the preceding decades (where the trend is obvious) and some local transients like el Nina which are BIG effects in short cycles.

    In other words, Bolt is bulldust, and I think he’s just self-promoting because he’s, well, let’s be frank, a rather angry and boorish character who’s full of himself! LOL

  11. Gary,

    I don’t know if you are trying to answer my question or not, so please do not take this as a dig at you, but I am looking for direct scientific information, not lists of scientist who are complaining about being on lists or information about who works for whom. This is the problem I find with most CC supporters who post in response to AB – just like the sceptics there, they don’t bother with any science.

  12. Thanks, Kirribilli Removals.

    PS Aren’t you out of a job now? Or are you hoping to remove Kevin ’07/’08/’09/’10/’11/12/’13/’14/’15 too?

  13. Bolt writes in a way that gives himself a thousand “outs”. If you challenge him he will be able to point to a get out clause. “I didn’t say that, I said …..”
    Sometimes in doing so he can out smart himself. For example on his blog he says –
    I have NOT said “the world’s temperature over the past 10 years has COOLED”, and I wonder why Wright found it necessary to exaggerate what I in fact did say, which was: “the world hasn’t warmed for a decade”.

    Then Bolt says –
    Further, I did not present my graphs as proof that the theory was false. Instead, I said only this:
    This recent COOLING doesn’t disprove the theory that man is warming the world. Ten years is too short to be sure of a trend. Natural factors may for now be countering the effect of our gases.

    So, did he say the earth has been cooling or not?

  14. 757
    ShowsOn

    Yeah, like today he made the ludicrous (and WRONG) claim that India and China have a ‘we won’t do anything policy’, and just as Mega tried to inform us about the facts, he just rode over the top of him!

    He’s a boorish, opinionated windbag who hasn’t even got the grace to listen long enough to have his nonsense queried.

    God he’s a cack!

  15. FTP – the more morning coffees the better, in my opinion (being a caffeine addict myself).

    I am suitably humbled by my misreading of your post. It’s just that I put up with a lot of that cer-rap – being told that the ALP only does things cos the Greens force them to, when I know (sorry Jen, we’ve discussed this on previous threads) that – as a political party, rather than individuals – the Greens go missing in action when it comes to supporting ALP governments to make the hard decisions.

    It’s pretty frustrating standing up in front of public forums to put the ALP position and knowing that the Greens speaker is going to SOUND more environmentally friendly than you can, when you’ve actually achieved more than the Greens speaker ever has or will.

    So it’s a bit of a button presser issue here in zoomland; I will try and keep my powder a bit drier in future.

    Anyway, I think my point is still valid – when the Greens have had real power (and bop is real power, just ask Senator Harridine) they haven’t done much with it (and in fact, I think the various Green coalitions in Tas were seen as dismal failures). Whether it’s because they’ve lacked the mystical influence of BB or because they don’t know what to do with it when they have it – the problem being that old one of balancing the ideal with the real – would make an interesting discussion.

    I’ve been told (hearsay!) that wherever the Greens do have power, they split into two basic groups – those who are realistic about what they can achieve and are willing to make concessions to do this, and those who hold fast to their ideals and won’t compromise. Apparently the former group inevitably wins out (which makes sense to me).

    So it will be interesting to see which way the present Greens in the Senate jump.

    (BTW Jen, for a political party such as the ALP, 1993 is comparitively modern times. I’ve been cautioned in the past not to associate with certain people in the party because they’re ‘splitters’ —- which goes back, of course, to the 1950s. More seriously, the past is the only guide we have, other than guessing, as to the likely behaviours of various groups).

    So it will be interesting

  19. steve,

    Am I reading it correctly that trend-line Greenland melting has increased fourfold over the last 20 years?

  22. I had lunch at my mum’s today. We hardly ever talk about politics because she doesn’t follow and isn’t interested in it. However, knowing that I like Kevin Rudd, she said to me that he would have been better off losing the election because he has aged so much! (Typical women, looking younger is more important than leading the country lol).

    It certainly has not been noticeable to me but I suppose it goes to show the effort the PM has been putting in. Rudd is performing exceptionally well and to expect too much more is being silly.

  23. 747
    steve Says:
    Apparently Shane Stone the former NT Chief Minister is now is being drafted as Big Chief Pineapple ahead of the Constitutional Conventions next weekend.

    And I hope he does for them what he did for the CLP in the NT, made them unelectable. Stone is one of the most arrogant people I have ever seen in public life.

    758
    Chris Curtis Says:
    So, simple question to you or anyone else: where do I look to find a scientific rebuttal of [Bolt’s] graphs?

    Another good site is

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

    771
    Kirribilli Removals Says:
    He’s a propagandist, pure and simple.

    That is the polite version.

  24. Zoom, interestingly we are in strong agreement.

    On another note, Andrew Bolt has no credibility, as a columnist why does he get a run. What is the criteria for being a journalist. Truth, Justice and the American way? He has based his career on an anti-climate change stance.,. Not often is someone so completely shown up as wrong. This is the simple truth that his stance on Climate Change is completely wrong and worse than that he has uses distortion and missrepresentation of scientific reports. He has been running around for years abusing people who have been trying to raise public awareness around our greatest challenge. Shame on those media outlets who still air such nonsense.

  25. My compliments to all you lucid folk over the political mindfield/minefield over the water issue.

    One reads J Diamond and others who describe the failure or actual end of various civilisations. I gloomily see SA at least worthy of a footnote in any or all of these conclusions.

    I totally agree with Bushfire about the politics and leading, BB is articulate, blindfolds off and definitely urgently required as Kev’s speechwriter. Though we probably are lost, as we cannibilise every resource.

    Welcome to the inaugral Easter Islanders/ Maya and whatever Club. I am just having a little difficulty in filling the quorum.

    Can someone tell me how to spell cannibilise? Or does it matter?

    It’s a bit of a toss up, really, between having one’s hateful government doing nothing and one’s wanted elected, government not doing the hardest of yards.

    Howard upon election did the easiest of yards.

    Putting the money into his pocket, to be lavished on special interests. Public and private. I won’t go on, but I assume that the general public had no idea of what cuts in say, R&D and the ideological underpinning for it actually meant for Australia, and say decreasing funding for apprenticeships to later be sopped by the toolbox offers, the cuts to Abstudy, and yuk, any number of things the Howard did, meaningless to the general public, such as increasing fee access to the High Court.

    I could write all day about this stuff, but guess what the voters are watching! The One True God. THE FOOTY. Maybe even at Randwick.

    ps Jen. The neighbour was deprived of his thingy which allowed overnight timed watering, because the Urban Guerilla was in the area.

    Anyway, back to Nirvana, I am wanted in the shed, people are asking and the tin prohibits internet access.

    I may be some time.

    The Public. Kev has to fix it. Now! And at no expense to anyone. ‘They’ did not it get then, hthougthey don’t get it now.

  27. Breaking news:

    New Greens policy: To merge all assets of the nation into a pool. Allocate 3/4 to the environment. And divide 1/4 equally among the population.

    🙂

  30. FTP @ 774:

    On another note, Andrew Bolt has no credibility, as a columnist why does he get a run.

    This morning on Insiders I listened to Bolt. I say “listened” because I could only log onto the News Radio version. I suppose if I’d watched the televisual spectacular I might have been able to sort out a few words that others were saying, by lip-reading, but on the radio, it was “All Bolt, All The Time”. And they say I’m a motor-mouth!

    The basic jist of Bolt’s attack was to try to pin Annabelle Crabbe into answering what (to Bolt) is the unanswerable question:

    “If Global Warming really exists, why has the Earth been getting cooler since 1998?”

    Boom-boom! There you go! Cop that, you unserious Fairfax “color” commentator, you!

    Well, here’s the answer, which Annabelle (despite her protestations that she reads Bolt’s blog assisuously) could not put into words.

    1. 1998 is not necessarily the hottest year since time-was. It is arguably the second hottest year. 2005 gets a good run at the guernsey. But I quibble…

    2. The years since 1998 have been slightly cooler than 1998 (if you don’t count 2005), but… compared to the previous decade, they have been much hotter. In short, we are in a plateau period, where temperatures are hovering around a stable value, slightly cooler than the real hottie of 1998, but a whole lot warmer than any other decade in recorded history.

    This extra heat is cumulative. That is, a few hot years in a row do a lot more damage to the environment than a one-in-a-century hot year, like 1940, or 1998. The polar ice doesn’t get a chance to re-freeze. Deserts spread. Vegetation dies out. Marginal agricultural lands become untenable. That’s what you get with a few hot years. And remember, out of the 10 hottest years since 1940, the 2000’s have had six of them. That’s six in eight years, compared to the other 4 in 60 years.

    So, either we’ve peaked in 1998 and the globally warmed planet will start cooling measurably, or Global Warming is just having a rest and will start up again next year, or the next… with a vengeance.

    Either way, Bolt is completely, totally, wrong in saying that “Global Warming is a ‘myth'”. Based only on crude temperature figures, he can’t substantiate that. He cannot possibly know whether the slope of the curve is going to be positive (warmer) or negative (cooler). The bulk of meterological opinion is that it will be positive.

    But all this is mere arguing at the margins…

    It all boils down to the traditional divide between Left and Right. Those on the Left tend to be GW believers, and those on the Right tend to be deniers. Bolt is on the right, so he is a denier. See? Simple.

    The next couple of years will tell for sure whether GW is real or just a maybe.

    If the latter – just a maybe – expect Bolt to continue to annoy and deflect like a March Fly on a NSW beach.

    If the former – it’s real – then expect him to disappear, only to be reformed as some other kind of nutbag with crackpot ideas.

    In answer to the original question (and I paraphrase), “Why does anyone give him oxygen?”

    That’s simple too: because the likes of Annabelle Crabbe, supposedly “senior” journalists, are more interested in the “color” of politics than the reality of the science.

    They’re plain, bone, bloody lazy and would rather crack a joke or write a witty pun than actually do a little reading on the subject. They take Bolt on, but have no hope. Although he does not really comprehend what he reads, Bolt has at least some facts and figures (no matter how twisted they are). Crabbe does not have anything but a smart mouth and a poison pen.

    And THAT’S why Bolt gets away with it: he both creates and occupies a vacuum of the national discourse which mere opinionation on its own cannot fill. Only facts can do that, and facts are sooooo inconvenient to the Annabelles of this world.

  33. Bushfire Bill,

    “Those on the Left tend to be GW believers, and those on the Right tend to be deniers.” This is my observation too, but why does a scientific question lead to such a political divide. I am interested in analytical answers, not the “Well, of course the [Left/Right] is more sensible” partisanship.

  34. In regard to the oft repeated but scientifically and statistically illiterate charge that the earth has cooled (or at least not warmed) since 1998:

    a) 1998 was an extreme event due to the hottest El Nino for many decades, very much a statistical outlier. That is why the deniers always pick it as the starting point for their ‘analysis’, because any other year does not support their claim. Which leads to…

    b) To construct a statistically reliable global temp trend the standard sample period is 30 years, not 10 (or 11, etc) , as Bolt and other deniers have had explained to them many times, but which they dishonestly refuse to acknowledge. Plus…

    c) There are other important lines of evidence confirming the sustained rise in temps, not just the straight temperature measurements, such as increasing rates of ice melts, and shifting plant and animal populations.

    And BB’s point about the heat from the sustained high temps being cumulative is a very important one.

  35. Chris, I think there are a couple of things that are pretty straight forward in the left / right warm / not debate.

    Firstly on the right we had Howard leading in the ‘no global warming – we shouldn’t do anything’ for much of the last decade. The conversion on the road to the election wasn’t really all that convincing, even I’m assuming for the disciples of the right.

    Secondly, and I don’t mean this as a put down, the left / green types really wouldn’t care if global warming was true or not, the proposed solutions are all more environmentally friendly (excepting the nuclear option which I don’t think any sane person would have predicted) than polute. I have a suspicion if the evidence for global warming was as unconvincing as the Bolt position there would still be many on the left prepared to embrace it.

    I think the next level of speculation might get us into right supporting the existing order (ie polluters, big industrial listed polluters should keep polluting for free), the left happy to change the rules and the market (ie polluters big industrial listed polluters should pay and if they go broke and stop employing x thousand people who cares).

  38. Graham Richarson was the first minister to politicise “The Environment” in response to his correct reading of the public mood.

    The Conservatives were slow to catch this mood – so they opposed it.

  39. Jen,

    The point re John Hoard certainly makes sense. The other one has some validity, but there have been scientific environmental issues that the right has embraced; e.g., the whole concept of Melbourne’s Green Wedges was developed under the Liberal Government of the late 1960s/ early 1970s.

  41. 783
    Chris Curtis

    It’s not even that simple a dichotomy CC. Every major global corporation, and most large national ones have been onto this for a decade at least, and they are hardly the bastions of radicalism. They are, however, conservative, (in economic and social senses) and have realised that the science was in WAY before the broader public. They also realised that they’d be crushed if they didn’t move first. This isn’t to say that there aren’t conflicted parties, ie trying to hold onto their emissions and profits as well as wanting to get into the new ‘green economy’. It’s just that they were often driving the politics because they know:

    1. On a risk assessment basis, doing nothing is not justifiable.
    2. Carbon based energy (especially gaseous and liquid ones) ARE finite anyway.

    On the other hand, the ‘left’ (greens and others) are perceived to be ‘religiously’ motivated, exculpating guilt and the original sin of, not eating an apple, but burning a tree.

    This argument is usually put by the deniers and far right, but I think it’s VERY exaggerated. Sure, religious fanaticism infects all human endeavour to various degrees, but the notion that climate change is the new secular religion seems fatuous to me. For chrissake, it’s based on scientific observation and theoretical modeling, not stigmata. My definition of oxymoron is “religious truth”. Scientific ‘truth’ is more about probabilities and measurement supporting theory. I don’t see much connection, but it gives the Chris Ulhmann’s of the world something ‘smart’ to say on Insiders I guess.

  42. Krribilli Removals,

    So the economic right is on the side of CC, but elements of the political right are not. I realise that with some of them it is their ideological opposition to the left that makes them take the stance they do, but it still seems to me that ideology should not trump science.

  43. 792
    Chris Curtis

    That may be asking too much CC! LOL

    It’s a matter of time, and given the overwhelming public support, I’d expect sooner rather than later. The rate of change is, in some areas, taking even the experts by surprise, and I’d think more ‘off the dial events’ are only likely to shift more people into the ‘convinced’ column.

    But you’re probably right; there’s always going to be those for whom it’s a game of political posturing.

    Pity, but we’ve just got to move around them.

  44. The June temp for Goddard Institute for Space Studies comes in at +0.26 C above the baseline. It has been the most aggressive measurements of all the predicting bodies. But it is the home of James Hansen, the father of Climate Change. On the other hand UAH has temps of -0.11 C from their baseline. Plenty of other reference sites, the trouble is they all would have errors with future climate projections.
    I am unsure why an ETS is being thrown at us when in my opinion the preservation of forests worldwide is the most effective means possible to ameliorate buildups of CO2. And that includes fixing the deforestation problem in Australia as well.

  45. 792 Chris
    Of course you’d have to be ‘educated’ enough to realise what science is all about. Take a look at the statistics of people who reject science in favour of creationism and, well, it’s depressing.
    There are ‘scientists’ who believe in creationism. Yeah right.
    Mighty dangerous territory mixing intelligence and politics…
    Oh, and a quick search for the bio of Uhlman would confirm what many suspect as to which side he sits on.

  46. [It all boils down to the traditional divide between Left and Right. Those on the Left tend to be GW believers, and those on the Right tend to be deniers. Bolt is on the right, so he is a denier. See? Simple.]

    Sections of the Left are good at denying science as well. For example many on the left still claim that nuclear power is an unsafe way of generating electricity. I think the biggest problem with nuclear power isn’t its safety, but its cost. Chernobyl was caused by power plant operators performing unauthorised tests with all the safety systems turned off (and arguably the reactor was poorly designed).

    And of course it predominantly is Left wing environmentalists (e.g. Greenpeace) that are holding up the use of genetically modified crops, which have the potential to save millions in Africa from blindness and starvation. See: Golden Rice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice and http://www.goldenrice.org/

    Hopefully in 10 or 20 years the use of GM to make crops more water efficient, or to aid farming in third world countries will be as common as the use of artificial sweeteners, or the use of GM cultures that are already used to produce cheese.

  47. 796
    Or the fact that we’ve been genetically modifying crops and livestock for a very very long time.
    Good points.
    Personally I don’t trust Australians to be able to build a safe reactor either – we have no pedigree for the type of engineering and construction required (any more).

  48. [Personally I don’t trust Australians to be able to build a safe reactor either – we have no pedigree for the type of engineering and construction required (any more).]

    We wouldn’t do it, it would probably designed by Westinghouse or General Electric – companies that have been building nuclear reactors for 30+ years. Of course it would be Australians that physically built the thing, but I think we could handle that.

    Anyway, my point was that there is a general skepticism of science that seems to cut right across the political divide. Just like there are some religious people opposed to genetic engineering – not because they know anything of the science involved – but on the grounds that it interferes with ‘God’s creation’.

  50. 798
    I’m on the same page, but we only do construction faster or ‘cheaper’. Wembley is a good example on how we measure up on projects of that magnitude – about as bad as it can get really.

    Back to the politics though – no one’s got any comments on Vaile, or does that about sum his contribution up?

Comments are closed.

Comments Page 16 of 17
1 … 15 16 17