Essential Research: 58-42

The latest weekly Essential Research survey (which gets its own thread in Newspoll off-weeks when there’s no Galaxy poll on the Sunday) has Labor recovering from an unheralded dip over the past fortnight, its two-party lead increasing from 56-44 to 58-42. Also featured are questions on leadership preference, which find Julia Gillard favoured over Malcolm Turnbull 39 per cent to 34 per cent and Kevin Rudd favoured over Gillard 63 per cent to 14 per cent, and expectations regarding the economy.

UPDATE (2/12/08): Today’s Courier-Mail provides further figures from yesterday’s Galaxy poll of 800 voters in Queensland, showing 38 per cent would like to go back to John Howard and Peter Costello, against 54 per cent preferring Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan.

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.

706 comments on “Essential Research: 58-42”

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  2. Sky news said that Pine just had a press conference saying that they would. He tried to pretend that it wasn’t a backflip but Kerin Gilbert said it was and Julia will be on him in QT.

  4. I think that Jenkins will have his hands quite full today with everyone wanting to get in one last dig at the other side before they break for the summer 😉 ….. essential viewing today 😀 …….

  5. Fliders Street Station has 4 direct tracks in and the same out with the city loop having four tracks also which have a capacity of 24 tph if properly run adds up to a capacity of 192 trains per hour. The main issues are operational and a lack of trains (The 1970`s Hitachi trains that were scrapped should not have been) not infrastructure.

  7. Whether the opposition has caved on the education funding or not, if we have any journalists left in the nation someone should still pursue Fielding on his reasons for opposing them. It will expose the fact that this nutter is backed by people well to the right of even the Nationals.

  8. [Fliders Street Station has 4 direct tracks in and the same out with the city loop having four tracks also which have a capacity of 24 tph if properly run adds up to a capacity of 192 trains per hour. The main issues are operational and a lack of trains (The 1970`s Hitachi trains that were scrapped should not have been) not infrastructure.]

    In Sydney the problems are more to do with CBD and other bottlenecks than a lack of trains

  10. Tom

    I don’t know the details but people I know who have analysed it say there is a major problem with the way the city loop works and the capacity to get trains through stations. Ideally they need to stop it working as a loop and turn it into two crossing lines.

    I still agree with you that more trains and the outer suburban extensions are needed – outer suburban service is very poor compared to inner Melbourne.

  11. The situation in Sydney is worse than Melbourne. Sydney not only needs more trains and the CBD bottleneck fixed, but the track and whole signalling system is old and in poor shape. It needs a major overhaul. Tacking on a few metro lines just avoids the problem.

  13. The city loop can still work at 24 trains per hour as loop if inefficiencies like long stops at Flinders Street.

    Changing the loop tunnels so they are no longer a loop route via Flinders St but a Flinders St by-pass would massively (so much so that the capacity constraints would be North Melbourne and Richmond making it rather over the top and a bit pointless) increase capacity through the city but would cost a bit in tunnel end relocation but still be a lot cheaper than the Footscray-Caulfield tunnel.

  14. [“It will give schools and teachers plenty of room for innovation and creativity, it will allow them to use their own professional judgment about how to develop and to deliver learning programs,” Senator Carr said today.

    Mr Pyne said Senator Carr’s assurances on the parliamentary record Hansard had the full force of Parliament in the event of any disputes in the courts.

    “If this changes, if the national curriculum does put those schools at risk then they will all be able to take the government to court and a judge will be able to rely on what Senator Carr said today.]

    Since when do comments made in parliament bind judges? LEGISLATION binds judges, because it describes the intention of the Parliament.

    What the hell is Pyne going on about saying that something Carr said in the Senate is what the legislation really means?

    Is it time I sent him another abusive email?

  15. The problem in Sydney is the lack of anyqhere to send the trains. Trains coming into the CBD have only limited options. The south coast line has its own tunnel out to Bondi Junction and avoids most bottle necks. All the other trains have to go around the city circle or across the harbour bridge. In peak hour, both the city circle and harbour bridge are at minimum allowed gap between trains. In addition, the busiest station, Town hall, is completely inadequate for the volume of passengers joining or switching trains.

    Geography doesn’t help. The harbour is so deep that any under harbour train tunnel has to start its descent at Central and would be luck to emerge again before St Leonards. Think of some of the deepest underground lines in London and you’ll understand why a harbour train tunnel gets trains under the CBD, but produces such deep stations that they are difficult for commuters.

    Then there is the problem that the Sydney commuter network and the freight lines are not seperate like other cities, and the load on the commuter services makes it difficult to use rail freaight in and out of Port Botany. Freight is also made worse by thge geography of the Sydney basin, which means all the train lines out of the basin in all directions are winding and would require a fortune to straighten out.

    The best plan, proposed in the late 1980s, was a new western CBD line, perhaps providing a back-up link to the harbour bridge, which could be used to get more trains into the CBD, and take the load of Town Hall and Wynyard. When they built the cross-city tunnell, the tunnel dipped to preserve the space for a western CBD rail line. But it would be heaps expensive to build and take years before it solved the city’s load problem.

  16. Sydney is in a real mess transport wise because it has made a lot of transport mistakes since the Great Depression/World Way Two.

    Building freeways/motorways and generally massively expanding the road network (done to a larger extent in Melbourne).

    Railway construction cutbacks the whole time since (which has been done in Melbourne but to less painful results).

    Replacing the inner-city trains with double-decker trains instead of re-signalling for shorter gaps between trains (not done in Melbourne).

    Getting rid of the trams (also not done in Melbourne).

  17. Tom 663
    I must admit I am backing away a bit from my earlier endorsement of the Victorian plan becuase the tunnel I thought they were announcing was what you just referred to and not the Footscray Caulfield one.

    Antony
    Agree with all that. The private proposal to build a fast train in from Parramatta involved a new line into the CBD for that reason and made some sense. The signalling is also important – Sydney doesn’t get full capacity out of the lines it does have because of poor old signalling. Arguably several CBD stations need to be rebuilt too. I can’t believe they would pass fire regulations after the (London) Kings Cross fire. the depressing thing about Sydney rail is that not only is it a mess, but I see no serious evidence of an intent to fix it.

  18. Antony has reminded me of another post World War Two problem with Sydney. Not extending the freight separation beyond the 1920`s suburban limits where it had been built to.

  19. Did anyone listen to the CEO of Australian Rail Transport Corp. slag of the trucking industry at the National Press Club yesterday?

  20. ShowsOn at 664, my understanding is that the courts can and do refer to Hansard as an aid in interpreting the intent and meaning of legislation if there are doubts in that regard. The relevant minister’s comments and explanation at the time the Bill is presented in Parliament may well be relevant and of assistance to the Court.

  21. ShowsOn

    It’s definitely time to send Pine another email. His level of attainment as your employee leaves a lot to be desired. It’s time to set some performance guidelines for him in writing. A few Key Performance Indicators wouldn’t hurt. And I’m concerned that he isn’t taking advantage of the significant “improvement opportunities” you have offered him.

    You might ask him exactly what legal action he proposes taking against Carr. I’d love to hear.

  22. 665

    Is there anything this man doesn’t know about? (seriously)… always with the detail and insight

    When I grow up – I wanna be Antony Green 🙂

  23. #657 Socrates
    Fielding opposed the bill on the grounds that funding was tied to the adoption of a national curriculum that does not yet exist. He doesn’t see why measures relating to the national curriculum can’t wait until it is written.

  27. 676,

    In case you missed the reason why; Rudd, Turnbull, the Defence Minister and one of his assistants are all in Sydney at the funeral for the soldier who recently died in Afghanistan.

  30. Crikey whine is going to need intensive care after the thumping Julia the Magnificent is giving him. She is wiping the floor with him.

    Not a lady to pick a fight with.

    whine is going close to being chucked out of the parliament.

  32. A year ago, the IPA published a list of the greatest mistaken decisions in Australian history. I’d add one they didn’t think of. That was to follow Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson’s route over the Blue Mountains with first the road, and then the rail line. It’s a tortuous route that makes for ineffeciaent rail freight.

    What was long advocated by the Country Party, but never backed by Sydney business interests, was the building of a a decent rail link up the Hunter and through the Great Dividing Range following the Goulburn River. This provides a lower level and far straighter link across the mountains. The proposal also involved a new port in Port Stevens north of Newcastle, a good deepwater port that now couldn’t be used because it has become a holiday and retirement haven. It would have avoided all the geographic problems that make Sydney a difficult freight port. (The Country Party didn’t help their cause because they tied the whole project into creating a seperate state in Northern NSW.)

    Sydney has dithered for years over a port/road/rail freight interchange site. Melbourne and Brisbane have done it, but nimbyism and lack of clear government decision making keeps styming it in Sydney. Geography didn’t help either. Melbourne had the spare land around the Port and the northern suburban boundary for interchanges was not as far distant as in Sydney. In Brisbane, there was lots of room to expand and build a new port at the mouth of the Brisbane River. Perth had the same advantage, building all the seperate rail links in standard gauge at the same time as they developed the Kwinana Industrial area.

    There is a big freight interchange at Parkes in central west NSW these days. It’s where the east-west and north-south rail freight links meet. All the freight to Sydney has to be put on smaller trains to get over the mountains, so more of the freight is going to Brisbane and Melbourne these days.

  34. Spam box, if you’re not careful, I’ll get on to Sydney’s mad public transport ticket system. You can buy a Travel Ten (ten trip) ticket for busses at newsagents. You can buy a bus weekly at Newsagents, and even a bus-rail weekly at newsagents. But if you want a rail weekly, or any rail ticket, you have to buy it at the train stations. And there is no rail equivalent of a Travel Ten. Nor is there a daily public transport ticket by zone. You can buy a daily ticket, but it covers the entire metropolitan area, which is not of much use to most public transport frequent users who live closer to the city.

    All Sydney fares are still point to point. You catch a bus on the weekend, and it will sit at a stop for several minutes while there are on-going disucssions with passangers about how much it costs to go where they are going, and then the necessary fiddling with purses and wallets.

    And then, all the frequent use tickets only apply to the state owned systems. The private bus companies have their own ticketing systems, many of which don’t offer multi-trip options, and if you are catching a train on to the city from the end of the bus route, require you to have another ticket for the train.

    Victoria introduced a common ticket system more than 20 years ago, but Sydney is still saying it can’t be done until they have a smart card. For a whole series of reasons to do with different union coverage of private and public transport services, and sweetheart subsidies for school students designed to keep private bus companies solvent, nothing has hapened to sort out Sydney’s public transport for decades. It all goes back to Jack Lang’s Transport Co-ordination Act which was designed to stop private bus companies competing with government owned trams. Ever since, state governments haven’t been building a better public transport system, they’ve been negotiating compromises between competing interests.

  38. [A year ago, the IPA published a list of the greatest mistaken decisions in Australian history.]

    I hope making Canberra our capital city was on that list.

  40. Dario if you were watching Swanny bumbled through a question by Julie on whether the Government would rule out creating a State owned Bank…Swanny did an awful job and didnt answer it and the Speaker called him 4 times to answer it and he didnt!

    Julie is doing well!

  42. No I didn’t. But I’m actually a keen cyclist and I like riding to work some days. But the entire ticketing system in Sydney is designed around people who do the same trip every work day. If you drive or ride some days, then public transport in Sydney becomes a mess because you have to keep fiddling round to buy tickets. And because all the tickets in Sydney are point to point rather than zonal, you have to buy an individual ticket all the time. The train ticket vending machines are also different from station to station because each station has a different set of point to point fares.

    Where I live, there are two stations close together on different lines, Erskineville and Newtown. They are just 1km apart, and weekly tickets from both stationsa to the city are the same price. Yet a friend of mine who had a City-Erskineville weekly caught the train to Newtown one day because the trains on the Erskineville line were stuffed, and was fined by an Inspector because his ticket, despite being the same price and same distance, did not entitle him to travel to newtown instead of Erskineville.

    It is also why they couldn’t get their smart card system to work. The fare were to complex. If you caught a bus, the card had to recognise you when you got on AND got off the bus. Instead of simplifying the system, they tried to duplicate the hideously complex and illogical current ticketing system.

    My logical nature just doesn’t cope with a system infested with no other logic than keeping a lot of ticket sellers and collectors in employment.

  44. Antony…the London Public Transport system uses Oyster Cards and they work well, i used them when i travelled there this year…it is a system that works and can be put in to the major cities what do you think about that?

  47. Glen – London has a zonal system, that’s how you make it work. Sydney has point to point tickets. In London you can by a daily zonal ticket, in Sydney you can’t. In London, all bus fares are the same wherever you are going, but most people have daily, weeklies or quarterlies. You can implement that sort of system, but you first have to simplify the ticketing.

    Melbourne’s a cinch. You buy a half day or full day ticket and hop on and off to your hearts content. Not in Sydney. It’s a weekly, or travel tens which you have to use on every trip, or you buy a fare each time.

  49. The advantage of the Oyster Card is that there are flat rates for any bus trips (1 pound each) regardless of distance, as well as a system of 10 zones (with 6 main ones and 4 that go into Hertfordshire) for the tube. In Sydney, there is still distance-based pricing for rail and distance-based pricing for buses. Also, there are no private buses in London – while there are heaps in Sydney.

    All in all – Sydney needs to sort out its ticketing system first before it can think about a T-card system…

  50. Antony 692 – well said!

    They could get integrated ticketing if they agreed to simplify the system but that means either making some people worse off or giving up some marginal revenue. Its silly really, because if they did it the extra passengers would probably make up for any revenue loss. But thats NSW financial management for you.

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