The parliamentary year has ended with a striking result from Newspoll: Labor leads 59-41, up from 55-45 last fortnight, with Kevin Rudd leading Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 66 per cent (up three) to 19 per cent (down two). Kevin Rudd’s approval rating of 70 per cent is one point shy of his previous best from April, while Malcolm Turnbull’s approval and disapproval have both gone five points in the wrong direction, to 47 per cent and 32 per cent (The Australian offers a graphic and a nifty preferred prime minister tracker showing figures back to early 2006). Nonetheless, the leadership ratings suggest voting intention would have been even worse for the Coalition if Brendan Nelson was still leader. Turnbull’s approval rating is still seven points higher than Nelson’s best result, and the 47 per cent gap on preferred prime minister is roughly equal to what Nelson managed when Rudd’s approval was in the mid-50s. Elsewhere:
• Essential Research also has Labor leading 59-41, up from 58-42 last week. Also featured are questions on the performance of Julie Bishop as Shadow Treasurer, the relative popularity of Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop and “global terrorism and international unrest”.
• The Australian Parliamentary Library has published a paper providing statistical details from every election since federation, along with a precis detailing the circumstances of each election.
• Sky News, Foxtel and Austar have announced that a public and political affairs television network called A-APAN, along the lines of the American C-SPAN, will be launched on January 20 next year. It will feature coverage of parliament and committee proceedings, industry meetings, and congressional and parliamentary coverage from the United States and the United Kingdom. It will be available on pay TV and digital free-to-air, the latter initially only in Sydney.
• Colin Barnett says the proposal for fixed terms in Western Australia will feature “a mechanism if there is some catastrophic behaviour of a government that you might be able to bring on a poll”. It will also provide for flexibility in the announcement of a date in either February or March, rather than fixing a precise date.
• Antony Green has weighed in on the recent criticism of New South Wales’ system of fixed four-year terms.
As long as Rudd is continuing to be seen to doing all he can to get us through this GFC he will remain popular. The moment people feel he’s given up Rudd will be in trouble, a scenario I don’t believe he will let happen, given that he is a man of ideas and prepared to act quickly.
It’s one thing to have unemployment rise and be seen to be doing nothing, it’s another to unemployment rise and to be seen fighting tooth and nail to prevent it rising further. People give you credit for the effort.
Brough would wipe the floor with Rudd.
There’s a smallish market research company in Australia that is currently experimenting with longitudinal political polling (which is where a poll uses the same sample, the same people every month)- hopefully I might be able to say more about that next year sometime. But one of the interesting things that has come out of their preliminary work is the almost 3 categories of Coalition supporters.
The first and by far the largest group is the absolute rusted ons that would still vote for the Coalition if some clown like Don Randall was leader.
The second was a group that mostly vote Coalition, supported Nelson in Better Prime Minister but don’t support Turnbull in BPM.
The third is the opposite – they still mostly vote Coalition, they didn’t support Nelson in BPM but now support TUrnbull on that measure.
Nelson failed in the same way that Turnbull has failed – they failed to harvest that extra 4% of the primary vote that is ordinarily a Coalition voting constituency but which is stuck on the other side of the ideological fence to the leader. It’s about twice that size on the BPM side of things (which really is interesting since ‘grumpy old conservatives’ think Rudd is better than Turnbull, while wet Liberals thought Rudd was better than Nelson – even though most of both groups would still vote Coalition).
But even if either of the opposition leaders were successful getting that extra few percent, the TPP polling wouldn’t be substantially different (because of where most of those votes are being parked)- a percent or 2 at the most.
With the 3 to 6 percent swings we’ve been looking seeing all year, Rudd has been responsible for most of it.
Nelson and Truffles have only been responsible for failing to consolidate a few points of the Coalition base – but they better get used to that with the twin support bases of the Coalition now unraveling without the power of Howard and incumbency.
The real danger for the Coalition is letting one side of that twin support base getting comfortable with Rudd and reducing their primary vote from not being able to breach 40 down to not being able to breach 38. 40 will hurt the Coalition at an election, 38 would kick the seven shades of the proverbial out of them.
[ Brough would wipe the floor with Rudd. ]
Bring it on !
brough cannot even hold his own seat. He fails to take his party and voters with him.
He got done like a dinner with Qld LNP deal and spat the dummy. Now thats leadership material.
#196
Glen, there’s a balance between working conditions and the level of employment. There arrives a point where more jobs no longer trumps pay and conditions. Gillard’s IR laws probably will lead to some job losses, but that’s just how it has to be.
Brough’s seat got redistributed!
197 – Adam ,again all true IMHO but you overlook the division within Liberal ranks. The Nats weren’t the only ones to cross the floor. Besides it’s a coalition, Turnbull leads the coalition. It is up to a coalition leader to keep the coalition united as well as his own party.
He lost. Thats L O S T
He got rolled with the Qld LNP deal – his own party and people.
Seriously – I hope he gets back and gets the job. Hope it happens.
[Brough would wipe the floor with Rudd]
Hahahaha, now that he’s lost his seat, Mal can’t even get on the floor!
With the next federal election about 16 months out, momentum can be built from here. Especially after everyone receives their Xmas pressies. The libs will be smashed in 2010
We can all argue about Howard’s policies but the one thing we can’t deny is that Howard kept the Libs and the coalition united right up to the dying days.
Mal Brough is as good if not better than most ALP Ministers…
Brough not only lost his seat, he lost it unexpectedly. The size of the vote against him was one of the biggest surprises of the election, so I’m not following why he would make a good leader.
So did stalin hitler & mao
I reckon Gillard, Albanese, Wong, Swan, Roxon, Tanner, Crean, Burke, Smith, Ferguson, Evans, Mcklennan, Plibersek and Maklin are all better than him Glen
Possum – God your mean to Dennis 😉 he finally come’s round and you still give him stick!
I think you just like picking on him 😉
Arguing whether Brough would make mince meat of Rudd or not really futile. It’s only an opinion and will very likely be untested.
Of course it’s my opinion Gary and i know none of you support it but in the short term it would be untested.
Triton – it didnt surprise many in QLD.
Brough’s alleged popularity with the public was proportional to their distance away from him.
[Mal Brough is as good if not better than most ALP Ministers…]
I don’t understand why the Howard government did essentially nothing to help Aboriginal communities for its first 11 years, then all of a sudden in the middle of last year start label drug dependency, violence and sexual abuse in those communities as a “national emergency”. Why was it such an emergency that they ignored the problem for 10 years?
Keating did nothing and the ALP did nothing in Opposition…at least we did something.
[Samantha Maiden, Online political editor | December 09, 2008
Article from: The Australian
BRENDAN Nelson has urged divided colleagues to “get behind Malcolm” in the wake of a bad Newspoll result warning it is in the national interest to deliver a strong opposition.
Senior Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb has also issued a stern warning on disunity this morning, conceding “the emergence of disunity within the coalition is working strongly against us”.
Emerging as an unlikely champion of the leadership of the man who was the greatest thorn in his side during his own tenure as Liberal leader, Dr Nelson has told The Australian Online that further divisions would be devastating.]
And here comes Nelson.
[I don’t understand why the Howard government did essentially nothing to help Aboriginal communities for its first 11 years, then all of a sudden in the middle of last year start label drug dependency, violence and sexual abuse in those communities as a “national emergency”. Why was it such an emergency that they ignored the problem for 10 years?]
Have you forgotten where the polls were at the time? It’s called desperation
Nelson should really be on the Front Bench or out the door.
[Senior Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb has also issued a stern warning on disunity this morning, conceding “the emergence of disunity within the coalition is working strongly against us”.]
What do you think it did when you knifed Nelson genius?
Dario if anything it made us even more unpopular…it was another case of doing something because it was right not popular!
Glen, Brough’s problem is that he thinks the world works the same way the army does.
You know – you bark your orders, you send in the units and shit happens.
That might work well for blowing stuff up, but as the NT intervention proved, it’s a ridiculous model when it comes to changing human outcomes on the ground.
Possum that is the way you get things done quickly…
Possum if he’d consulted widely, if he’d had a white paper the Intervention would have been so watered down and politically correct that no good would have come from it.
Brough was ultimately answerable to the people of his electorate, and they spoke their verdict emphatically.
In his Sunshine Coast area are great numbers of single mothers, who his government dragged over the coals with their regressive workhouse laws and vicious victim-blaming ala “dole bludgers” in which Brough joined vociferously.
It’s pretty hard to assess the outcomes of the intervention when there were never any performance indicators set when it began and that there’s very little data coming out of it. It makes it hard to argue about the overall merits or otherwise of the intervention that’s for sure.
Glen’s measure for assessing the effectiveness of the intervention is of course to look at who started it. If Liberal started it it’s an unquestionable success, if Labor had started it it would be a politically correct disaster.
[Dario if anything it made us even more unpopular…it was another case of doing something because it was right not popular!]
Precisely my point
[Possum that is the way you get things done quickly…]
Or it’s the way to generate an awful lot of heat and very little light, which is what seems to have occurred.
[Possum if he’d consulted widely, if he’d had a white paper the Intervention would have been so watered down and politically correct that no good would have come from it.]
You dont need a white paper Glen, you just need something larger than the back of an envelope.
Possum most politicians of both parties engage in efforts like this precisely because if they’d have taken a long time to nut them out they’d be leaks and the effectiveness of what they wanted to do would have been tarnished…Brough had the right idea, if the NT Govt had not acted and was unwilling to act, the Feds had to and quickly before the latte drinkers kicked up a stink over it and water it down too much.
Glen, I have tried to alert you to the facts about Brough several times. Brough’s defeat had nothing to do with the redistribution. All the suburban booths swung more than 8% against him. Brough was not popular in Longman. Popular members do not get 10.2% swings against them. Look at Peter Lindsay in Herbert – he is genuinely popular and he held out against the Rudd swing. There were good reasons for Brough being on the nose in Longman. I am aware of them but I am not going to describe them here. I suggest you contact someone in the Qld Liberal Party and they will give you chapter and verse on why he is a big fat dud. He will not be back, so get over it.
Adam he got a swing to him of 6% + in 2004, plus the swings against the Coalition in QLD were larger than elsewhere on average. Adam i know of the personal family issues to which you refer…
As shown last night on ‘The Howard Years’.
The Liberals had tried “watering down” SerfChoices. No bounce.
They tried huge budget tax cuts. No bounce.
They acted on Hicks at last (though with an embargo on his being able to speak till after the election). No bounce.
The Intervention – scribbled on the back of a table napkin one weekend by the harsh, victim-blamer, go-in-all-guns-blazing Brough – was just another electoral gimmick tried by Howard who had a long reputation of ambivalence toward Aboriginal people.
No bounce.
[ if they’d have taken a long time to nut them out they’d be leaks and the effectiveness of what they wanted to do would have been tarnished]
Only the political effectiveness would have been tarnished, not the policy effectiveness. A responsible government puts the latter before the former.After watching last nights dreary conclusion of Grumpy Old Men – The Kirribili Eviction, we can all pretty much see which category the NT intervention fell under as far as Howard was concerned.
Brough on the other hand just had a ridiculously simplistic view of the world bordering on delusional.
I guess if you had read and heard about the kind of things going on in those communities as Mal Brough did, you’d have a simplistic view about the need for something to be done ASAP.
Simplistic “solutions” aimed at consolidating support among simple-minded conservatives.
“None so deaf as those who will not hear.” OK Glen you can continue with your Broughian fantasies, but they will avail you nought.
Cuppa it’s nice to know you’d have done nothing and let that kind of crap continue to go on in those communities…it brings a new meaning to the lable compasionate left winger!
[I guess if you had read and heard about the kind of things going on in those communities as Mal Brough did, you’d have a simplistic view about the need for something to be done ASAP.]
Does “ASAP” mean “in the last year of the government’s fourth term”?
The only Qld Libs who are earning their pay IMHO are Ciobo, Mason, Brandis and Trood, who are all quite smart and presentable. Boyce and Robert may join them in time. The rest are either past it or useless.
237 – oh please
[Boyce and Robert may join them in time. The rest are either past it or useless.]
I was disapointed that Peter Dutton hung on last time.
Hopefully the good people of Dixon put him out of his misery at the next go round.
Glen
If you had been seeing these kinds of things going on in those communities for 30 odd years, and been to planning meetings, written funding submissions, lived in the communities and managed programs during any part of that, and watched the never-ending spiral of hope generated by new policies followed by funding cuts, rejection of ideas, ignorance and grandstanding – not to mention blame-the-victim, then you would recognise the stench of hypocrisy in the Howard/Brough ‘solution’.
ShowsOn ATSIC and the rest of those bodies did nothing, and it was only then we had enough reports into it to justify such measures.
Glen, you don’t find it revealing that the Liberals waited till the darkest, most desperate days in the headlight of an approaching election train wreck – when they urgently needed a rabbit to pull out of a hat – to “act” after a decade of ambivalence?
Dutton was a tolerably competent junior minister. In a frontline portfolio he is waaaay out of his depth. Roxon may not have Gillard’s glamour status but she is a very tough cookie. Dutton is not up to dealing with her.
Itep
“It’s pretty hard to assess the outcomes of the intervention when there were never any performance indicators set when it began ”
Looking at a geograpghy map would have helped Its th geography issue no one wants to face
Aborigines for reasons incl cultural want to live in a particular location Th location may be suitable for traditional tribal hunting & living However th locations ar often totaly unsuitable to sustain a western econamy and/or provide employemnt and/or entertainment , and especialy re services available Social consequences arise and people wonder why , and won’t look at a map Sometimes everyone is at fault and sometimes no one is , but problams remain irrspective