Newspoll: 58-42

The latest fortnightly Newspoll shows no change from Labor’s towering 58-42 lead from the last survey. Kevin Rudd’s preferred prime minister rating is up two points to 64 per cent, while Malcolm Turnbull’s is steady on 20 per cent. More to follow. (UPDATE: Graphic here.)

Also today, Essential Research has Labor’s lead at 62-38 in its weekly survey, up from 61-39 last time. The poll also features results on views of the economy (nervous), support for federal control over primary health care (overwhelming), Rudd versus Costello as well as Turnbull, and – interestingly – how respondents would feel about an early election if the Opposition continued to oppose financial measures (38 per cent good, 34 per cent not good).

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.

1,782 comments on “Newspoll: 58-42”

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  1. Something from Melbourne’s Herald-Sun comments page:

    [Company executives are responsible to the shareholders and nobody else. Under the Corporations Act they are legally obliged to look after the interests of shareholders above all else. They are required by law to make the maximum profit for shareholders and the Board, elected by the shareholders, decides how to reward the CEO based on how much profit is generated for shareholders. If Company Directors put any interests ahead of the shareholders, they can be be barred by ASIC from being a Director, fined and potentially go to jail. It may sound immoral but that is the law. If you don’t like it, lobby the government to change the Corporations Act.]

  3. [Annabel Crabb – Burke flexed his rod and cast effortlessly, mentioning that he had had the privilege of viewing an interview on Tuesday night between Kerry O’Brien of the ABC and Malcolm Turnbull of her majesty’s loyal Opposition.
    Burke mentioned that the commercial networks, at the same time, were screening Animal Rescue, Wipeout Australia, and The Biggest Loser.
    “I had to check which channel I was on,” he confessed.]
    Funny stuff.
    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/burkes-lesson-on-perils-of-planting-20090226-8j9n.html

  4. Steve K @ 1698, they might have been inspired also by Obama …. he’s been making similar noises for some time although I suspect that Rudd & co. might be quicker on the draw about actually accomplishing this …..

  5. Dear All,
    Long time reader, first time bludger.
    With all the rumblings about DD’s (which I don’t believe for a moment), it got me thinking. In the case of the senate, which senators would be elected for the half term (4 years) and which for the full 8? Is it the first 6 elected in each state?
    Look forward to making some more meaningful contributions.
    Cheers
    DM

  7. This ought keep Kruggman happy (if they Nationalise the banks as well).

    U.S. president to seek $3.606 trillion for first budget.
    Without trimming his ambitious campaign promises, the president projects a budget for the 2010 fiscal year of nearly $3.6 trillion
    Of the $3.55 trillion requested for the 2010 fiscal year that begins in October, more than $2 trillion is mandatory spending for the programs — chiefly Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that provide benefits to all who are eligible
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/politics/27web-budget.html?_r=1&hp

    http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-02/26/content_10904768.htm

  8. [If dolphins are so smart, why don’t they jump over the bloody fish nets instead of ending up in my tuna sandwich?]

    I’ve always been puzzled by claims that whales and dolphins are as smart as humans. Human intelligence didn’t happen by accident, it evolved through the pressures of natutal selection, to enable our ancestors to survive in a world of sabre-tooth tigers etc. Whales and dolphins do nothing but swim around and eat fish – for which you need no more intelligence than a shark has. Most importantly, they have no hands. It was the hominds’ tactile engagement with the external world that stimulated the evolution of intelligence, through a process of hand-eye-brain-hand feedback. Why and how would the cetaceans have evolved superior intelliegence when they have no need for it?

  10. dovif
    Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 at 3:15 pm | Permalink

    Have you heard of the supply and demand curve, if wage cost go too high, company goes overseas to get their labour and people loses their jobs.

    etc.

    I have an even more basic one for you; people need money to buy stuff, economies need people buying ( they are called consumers).

    I know it’s a difficult concept and the lesson should stop here, but I will go on.

    This basic concept leads to other issues, when the consumers are in one country and the producers in another ( because they get paid to little to be good consumers) the result is trade in-balance, and a rising consumer nation debt, I will stop here and not try and explain why that makes the global trading system unstable and why a global financial crises is inevitable.

    The solution to our problems is not to remove all consumers from the system, the solution is to add consumers, that is increase the wages paid in China.

  11. Bree
    Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 at 1:40 pm | Permalink

    Has Rudd’s first $10 billion package improved Harvey Norman at all?

    Saw Harvey Norman on sunrise eating humble pie Wednesday, yes the stimulus package has helped and things aren’t as bad as he thought.

  12. [increase the wages paid in China]

    A very good point Fredn. China is trying to become a capitalist country, and a central player in the world capitalist system, while omitting one central ingredient – a market mechanism for setting the price of labour. The cost of labour of artificially held down by the state in order to keep manufactured goods for export as cheap as possible. But this means that the Chinese people have no purchasing power to buy either Chinese or imported goods. This both creates a massive trade imbalance and makes China’s growth totally dependent on the US and Europe as markets for its cheap exports. When the US and Europe go into recession, China’s exports slump and its economy crashes. Since holding down wages precludes both political democracy and free trade unions, the Chinese people have no outlet for their discontent – a very dangerous situation, as we are no doubt about to find out.

  13. Adam

    When it’s brain to body weight ratio Dolphins win. Perhaps not knowing how dolphins use the brain mass is a reflection of our lack of brain mass. When it comes to actual mass (which I suspect matters) the elephant beats us by about 4 to 1.

    I suspect that humanity is where we are at because we work together, because we can use things learnt by previous generations and there is a lot of us. I suspect our brain mass is large enough to do that and little more.

    We are bees with brains. Society matters!!!!!

  14. You can BANKs on the Chinese.

    [The global economic crisis has not taken a big toll on China’s banking industry as its lenders have cumulatively posted after-tax profits of 583 billion yuan ($85.23 billion) in 2008, the country’s banking regulator said yesterday.

    The profits showed a growth of 30.6 percent over the previous year. It would ensure that Chinese banks would rank on top of global bank ratings in 2008, said Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) yesterday. ]

    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-02/27/content_7518345.htm

    After that you can BANG on your Made in China rice bowl as they buy into Rio and friends:

    [BEIJING – CHINA is confident it can meet its growth target of 8 per cent this year though ‘downward pressure’ from the global economic crisis is growing, the deputy chairman of its planning agency said on Friday.

    The comments in a nationally televised news conference were Beijing’s latest effort to reassure uneasy consumers and companies and encourage them to keep spending – a key part of its multibillion-dollar plan to pull the economy out of its slump. ]

    http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_343742.html

  15. The one big thing the Chinese have going for them is that their banks are either state-owned or indirectly state-controlled. They will go on lending because the state will tell them to do so. Thus China will not fall into the financial freeze currently afflicting the west UNLESS their banks actually go broke, which is possible given the mountains of unrepayable debt they have accumulated.

  16. Re 1714,

    [
    The global economic crisis has not taken a big toll on China’s banking industry as its lenders have cumulatively posted after-tax profits of 583 billion yuan ($85.23 billion) in 2008, the country’s banking regulator said yesterday.
    ]

    Is the Chinese currency freely traded on the open market or do they “set” its value?

  17. The sad thing is Adam, China had just started to do something about it, the government had brought in laws starting this year that limited the working week ( the overtime multipliers looked as if they had been lifted from an Australian award.) and set a minimum wage.

    I agree with your comment on china’s political stability, to my mind that and not this recession is the biggest threat the world faces in the next decade. It’s also why I believe one can be pretty confident China will stimulate the hack out of their economy, politically an economic downturn will make the country too unstable.

  18. [BEIJING – CHINA is confident it can meet its growth target of 8 per cent this year]

    The parties of high unemployment will be really pissed if the economy of those bloody red commie bastards doesn’t go down the gurgler like the economies of most of the free market communities.

  21. Ok fredn, that answers my question then. What that tells me is that since they set their own rates and the yuan isn’t floated like most other currencies world wide, that they may indeed be able to write their own script as it were regarding how the GFC affects them ……

  22. [The success of the communist economies when the capitalist system last funked was one reason for the new deal.]

    But China isn’t a communist economy – it’s a capitalist economy run by communists. There are only two genuine communist economies left: Cuba and North Korea, and they are both abject failures.

  23. China’s bank’s can lend until the country runs out of foreign reserves. One interesting piece of trivia, China used silver not gold as their underpinning metal in the 1930’s so there economy was not restricted by the lack of gold that prevented governments using stimulus packages to stop the onset of the last depression.

  25. [Is the Chinese currency freely traded on the open market or do they “set” its value?]

    juliem, yeah let the market rips again. the japanese really yen for the “freedom” the chinese have with their yuan. it’s kinda like the ying and yang really.

  26. [In the case of the senate, which senators would be elected for the half term (4 years) and which for the full 8? Is it the first 6 elected in each state?]

    Hey Dave M welcome to PB, come on in the waters fine!

    We had this discussion a while back.

    Basically all 12 in each state are up for review. And if my memory serves me the top 6 are in for 6 years, the bottom 6 get 3 years.

    Though don’t quote me on it…

  28. Adam I’m talking about the 1930’s. In the 1930’s capitalism was a abject failure, it was the new deal that fixed the problem, I would argue we are now in the mess we are in because the lessons were forgotten.

  29. Now this should be interesting. The Libs will of course want to have employers remain on top and the Greens will push for greater protection for workers. The Govt will want minimal change to the proposed legislation. Will the Libs blink and side with the government or will they take a walk into the valley of death?

    “Govt’s Fair Work Bill attracts Senate criticism

    The Federal Opposition says a Senate inquiry into the Government’s proposed workplace relations laws has raised concerns the changes will lead to job losses.

    The Senate Committee has tabled a report from its three-month inquiry into the Government’s Fair Work Bill, ahead of a vote later this year.

    In a majority report, the Government members on the committee recommended minor changes to the laws, and said they should be passed without delay.

    However the Opposition and the Greens both want significant changes.

    Liberal Senator Gary Humphries says the Opposition is concerned the proposed laws could hurt business and therefore cost jobs. “We had dozens and dozens of witnesses,” he said. “Not one witness before the inquiry said to us, ‘pass the legislation as it stands’. Everyone of them – union, business and other – said, ‘you should make changes’.”

    The Greens argue the laws do not meet Australia’s international labour obligations.
    It says the Government has broken its promise to “tear up” the former government’s WorkChoices laws. Senator Rachel Siewert says the proposed unfair dismissal laws do not go far enough and there is still the potential for some workers to be exploited. “In the individual flexible arrangements, we think there’s a danger we may actually get agreements for arrangements that are in fact worse than AWAs,” she said. “Under the Government’s proposed system, nobody can even can check the arrangements that are made between an employer and employee.”

  34. I feel strongly about than excessive executive salaries. No executive should be paid more than 50 times the coys lowest full-time salary and anymore than 3 million should incur a tax rate of 80%.

    Follows on from 1732. How did that happen, I have no idea!

  37. Intersting take by Turnbull on salaries – is he saying only because he know it won’t get done?

    [“Mr Rudd likes to talk about executive salaries, but he doesn’t do anything about it,” he said.

    “All you need to do is change the law and say the senior executives – the chief executive and say the next two or three people – their salaries must be approved by the shareholders.

    “If the chief executive can persuade his shareholders that he’s entitled to a big salary then so be it. But I don’t think any of us have any doubt that if the shareholders had to vote on these salary increases, then you would see much more modest increases.” ]

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/27/2503443.htm

    Just bought U2’s new album. …. am loving it.

    Ok, flame me at will! 😆

  43. [And he plans to pull out of Iraq by August 2010….]
    Apparently Bush signed a document saying that’s when most of the U.S. personnel would leave. They are allowed to keep 50,000 there after that date.

  44. Obama today said that their stimulus spending was necessary to generate future growth, which will ultimately reduce their budget deficit.

    Sounds a bit like Rudd’s policy, spending now to bring the budget back to surplus over the economic cycle. BUT does Turnbull agree? Nooo! What a lightweight. I have been telling fellow bludgers that Turnbull was a lightweight from day 1 😉

  45. [An existing U.S-Iraq agreement, negotiated under President George W. Bush, calls for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Baghdad and other cities by the end of June, with all American forces out of the country by the end of 2011.]

    Good thing while that the whole time they fixed Iraq, they haven’t had to worry about Afghanistan. – It was lucky, otherwise that war could have really developed into a bit of a quagmire….

  47. I suspect those crowing about Australia’s relative economic performance and the masterful role of the Rudd ascendancy should perhaps hold their breath for a while…our no 1 trading partner is enjoying declines in industrial production at rates of about 10% per month…

    On top of that China has 20 million out of work (how they counted that nobody quite kinows).

    On top of that jobless rates in Europe continue to climb…

    On top of that, on top of that…

    No economy is an island. The bells are tolling.

  48. The Finnigans

    I am sure Adam love his site. 🙂

    What is the url for your web thingo 5.0b bells and whistles all singing and dancing, site? 😛

  49. [Sounds a bit like Rudd’s policy, spending now to bring the budget back to surplus over the economic cycle.]
    This is just orthodox counter cyclical spending. Moreover, this happens automatically, as people lose their jobs the government hands out more unemployment payments which if a slow down is severe enough automatically makes the budget go into deficit.

    The people Turnbull quotes say just rely on the automatic stabilisers to increase government spending, whereas most economists say the government must spend even more above and beyond that.

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