The latest quarterly Newspoll survey of Queensland voting intention continues the national state-level trend, with Labor’s primary vote plunging five points to 38 per cent against 41 per cent for the newly merged Liberal National Party. Labor maintains a narrow 51-49 lead on two-party preferred, with the Greens on 9 per cent. The previous survey had Labor leading 55-45 from primary votes of 43 per cent for Labor (itself down from 50 per cent in January-March), 26 per cent for the Liberals and 12 per cent for the Nationals. Anna Bligh’s approval rating is down eight points to 54 per cent, but she leads Lawrence Springborg as preferred premier 53 per cent (down seven points) to 27 per cent (up three points).
Dovif drivels:
GRN don’t always preference the ALP. For example in Blacktown at the last state election GRN did not preference anyone.
Obviously GRN will on most occasions preference the least worst option from their point of view especially where that is strategic for them to do so.
At least the GRNs do not do something stupid like preference a candidate from a tiny right wing Xtian cult in the vague hope of re-electing a stupid, lazy, right wing, socially facist, SDA union hackette.
It does appear that what they mean, Grant, is the seats not held by sitting members. Sitting members are automatically selected without a preselection bunfight as per the Liberal National Party constitution.
On another development yesterday, it does appear Stuart Copeland is going to sit it out as the defacto hard working Member for Toowoomba North. Horan must be going to retire at the next election or shortly after if:
a) The LNP don’t win the twenty seats needed to form Government or
b) He does not get given a ministry.
Copeland can just sit in Toowoomba South campaigning full time and stare down anyone else who might want preselection and try to win on the basis of renewal in the Liberal National Party. It is an old trick but a goodie and a bit of insider information as to just when Horan will retire goes a long way.
@ 10 Dovif pork pies:
At the 2003 NSW general election the state electoral district of Swansea was won by the incumbent Orkopolis with 55% first preference votes therefore a distribution was not required. However the electoral office did conduct an exhaustive distribution to determine the 2PP vote. The GRN preferences were the last to be distributed and 53% of their ballots were exhausted. Of the remaining 1523, 1176 were directed to the ALP.
In the case of the division of Robertson at the 2007 Federal general election, the ALP candidate’s election was indeed due to an 80% preference flow from the 7.2% of electors who had given their first preference to the GRN candidate. It was a close run thing however, and had the Liberals done their job and run someone other than the incumbent time serving cypher their candidate may well have secured more preferences from the even more minor parties and rendered the GRN vote nugatory.
In any event get your facts right son and try to understand that even committed ALP voters held their nose whilst casting their ballot for La Neal.
Thanks Steve, I should have thought of that.
If there is anyone who has not had the joy of reading Springborg’s inaugural speech, here it is:
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/legislativeAssembly/documents/memberBio/InauguralSpeech/Springborg.pdf
In it we learn he has never written a speech in his life including this one and doesn’t intend to ever do so. His thoughts on what age he will get out of politics and why are compulsive reading.
#55
From Lawrence’s maiden speech:
“Australia’s south-east Asian neighbours—countries such as Japan—are
following the path…”
Hopefully Lawrence has gotten himself a new speechwriter by now.
albatross
thanks for providing the support for my argument
in both cases Green htv tells their member (who followed it) to vote 80/20 for such fine members of the human species
albertross 51, never truer words have been said, especially your LAST sentence!
Alastair Furnival is an interesting chap. Has Santo taken over the Nats?
ruawake, I am not familiar with the work of Alastair, what is his claim to fame?
According to Queensland Liberals, Australian Public Affairs will be controlling the process of candidate selection for all seats where there isn’t a sitting Liberal or Nationals member. Which, as the email indicates, is quite a lot.
Who is Andrew Bibb? He’s a former Campaign and Policy Manager for the Nats and adviser to Lawrence Springborg. And he’s controlling preselections for the “new” party.
Who are Australian Public Affairs? The chairman is Alastair Furnival, a hard-right Liberal Party functionary closely aligned with Santo Santoro, for whom he was Chief of Staff during Santoro’s thankfully abbreviated stint as Minister for Aged Care. Furnival was also editor of The Conservative, under the stewardship of — you guessed it — Santoro (other editors of included Connie Fierravanti-Wells and former Howard staffer Gerry Wheeler, suggesting The Reactionary would have been a more appropriate title).
Courtesy Crikey.
Yes, they do seem an interesting bunch. I’m sure they will spend Clive’s money wisely.
http://www.apa.net.au/staff_profiles.html
Apparently only 2000 of the 5500 Liberal members have joined the LNP. I smell a new “liberal” party brewing.
Yes, which makes this poll all the more interesting and more the work of spin doctors than anything the Liberal National Party has done in the past few months. I have read all the question times in Hansard since the merger and fail to see any difference from the ones I read prior to the merger.
Either there will be a new Liberal Party or a nasty courtcase I’d suggest ruawake. The Federal Executive of the Liberal Party was supposed to meet in Canberra last Friday to endorse the merger through Turnbull going to the National Council of the Liberal Party but I have not seen a word about this meeting in the local papers since the event.
steve
Federal Liberal MP Ian Macfarlane says the party’s federal executive will fast-track the ratification of the Liberal National Party (LNP).
Liberals against the merger were hoping party bosses would delay moves to recognise the party, formed by the amalgamation of the Queensland Liberals and Nationals in July.
But Mr Macfarlane says instead of sending the decision through federal council, they have decided to look at quicker methods.
“They recognise firstly there is extraordinarily strong support for the LNP is Queensland and that on that basis we need to resolve any uncertainty that surrounds the federal status of the LNP,” he said.
“Having looked at the process it may be possible not to require the use of a federal council meeting.”
The mess continues, McFarlane is trying to sneak it through the backdoor. Yep it will end up in court AND spawn a new party. 😉
So Macfarlane looks like he isn’t confident that the numbers are there on the Liberal Party Federal Executive to ratify the merger.
In a Federal sense it does not matter until the next election, because existing LNP members are allowed to be members of another party.
The preselection mess will be the real test.
Hey steve – I wonder if this will get more people to post on this thread?
Greens Boo 😉
@ 57 Fetid persists
I dare say you will stick to your own fantasies whatever evidence is presented to the contrary.
You cannot say without evidence of the actual 2004 HTV that GRN voters gave their second preference to Orkopoulos. The GRN candidate was the last eliminated in the preference check and so we do not know if Mr Orkopoulos was preferenced second or fifth. I would venture to suggest that it would have been after the DEM and SOS candidates and before the PHON and AAFI. In any event he was at the time without any public taint and won the poll handily on first preferences.
You should note that at the 2007 state general election in the district of Swansea the GRN candidate was again the last eliminated. That time the preference count was necessary and GRN preferences which were not exhausted flowed 2 to 1 in favour of the Liberal candidate.
In federal elections voters are in order to cast a formal ballot constrained to indicate their preferences in full. What would you have GRN electors do in Robertson? Cast an informal vote? Use their preferences to return to parliament a candidate who proposed policies and held views which were, we might suppose, diametrically opposed to theirs? At least La Neal had formally agreed to support in parliament policies which although would fall short of what most GRN voters would want would be kind of acceptable. I would suggest that blame for any failure to detect any possible flaws in her temperament should laid at the door of 227 Sussex Street, Sydney and not be made the responsibility of voters whose only desire was to rid this country of the most reprehensible and odious shower that had ruled over this wide brown land.
^^^ I mean 337 Sussex Street
albertross,
Why is it those neo-cons never let the truth, facts and evidence get in the way of their fantasies?
That’s probably why the’re slowly becoming extinct.
Dovif
Just picking up on one point you made about following HTV cards. People are creatures of habit or perhaps they just like the power our great democracy gives them and want to indicated preferences.
At the 2007 state election in the district of Blacktown the GRNs did not allocate preferences. This decision was, incidentally, made by Blacktown Greens members in a secret ballot conducted at an ordinary meeting.
I handed out HTVs on election day. More than a few electors approached me to ensure that the suggested vote was valid. When they were counted it emerged that only 58% exhausted, and of the rest 20% went to CDP, 19% to Lib and 60% to ALP.
Go figure…
Former Howard government minister Mal Brough has quit the presidency of the Queensland Liberal Party.
Mr Brough was elected to the position earlier this year, before the party merged with the Nationals to form the Liberal National Party (LNP).
This afternoon, Mr Brough said he had enough of bickering over who will pay the Queensland Liberal Party’s outstanding debts.
“Well, I’ve just had a gutful, quite frankly. I think this whole thing is a bit of a shambles,” he told 4BC radio.
“You try and do the right thing and, quite frankly, at this point it’s all over the shop and it’s no wonder voters get so disenchanted with the non-Labor side of politics.”
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/brough-quits-liberal-presidency/2008/09/25/1222217423498.html
Queensland Liberal Party debts? Perhaps they will deal with them them the National Party way…
Socialise them…
Albert the Liberals let their candidates overspend their budgets in the last campaign on the basis of a Galaxy Poll the weekend before the 2006 election was called that had similar figures to this Newspoll and wasted $1 Million dollars on the Gold Coast Council elections without even winning a ward let alone the mayoralty. Great economic managers indeed!
Now we have a bunfight over who has the right to derigister the Liberal Party.
[Mr Brough said the move by the LNP to deregister the state Liberal branch was not legally possible until the federal party recognised the LNP.
“There is no federal approval and they have no authority to deregister anything,” Mr Brough told The Australian.
But LNP vice-president Gary Spence said he had a letter of authority from Mr Loughnane to proceed with the deregistration of the Queensland Liberal Party.
Mr Spence said he had also been given the go-ahead by Mr Stockdale.
“Everything I’m doing is being done with the full knowledge and approval of Alan Stockdale,” Mr Spence said.
But Mr Stockdale said he had not had any communication with Mr Spence or the LNP about deregistering the Queensland Liberal branch. “I had no knowledge of the deregistration move,” Mr Stockdale said.
Mr Loughnane said he had not given a letter of approval for the deregistration move to Mr Spence or anyone else in the LNP. “I had no prior knowledge of any state deregistration application,” he said.]
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24403309-5006786,00.html
I wonder if Mal’s departure would have been influenced in any way by a request from Alan to be introduced to Sue?
Mal’s dead folks- Mal’sd dead. AS is the QLD National and Liberal parties. Additionally, consultants do actually “facilitate” the preselections – not selecting candidates. Consultants do organise the running of preselections. Labor do it, Dems DID it, Libs do it, LNP will be doing it. Bernard’s political judgement is as sharp as a lemon. That’s just one of the reasons I cancelled my subscription to Crikey. As for spin doctors- QLD Labor Government has over 300 and counting. They get paid better than QLD Health workers too.
[Consultants do organise the running of preselections. Labor do it…]
No they don’t. 🙂
ruawake: “No they don’t.”
Hawker-Britton would be amazed. Their capital was built on it.
Talk about a lot of worry over nothing on this tread the LNP is a structurally sound new political force and i’m sure it will deregister the former Queensland Liberal Party quickly, Preselect the best conservative minded candidates for the next election, pay off the former Queensland Liberal Party debts and sell the former Queensland Liberal Party headquarters in trinity lane, South Brisbane. The Southern Liberals will recognise the new party and if it doesn’t it won’t matter Queenslanders make their own decisions and the LNP is our new conservative force.