Morgan: 61-39

Labor has enjoyed an unlikely sounding spike in the latest Morgan poll, to 61-39 from 57-43 a fortnight ago, for which the most likely explanation is that the previous one was a rogue. Its primary vote is up 4.5 per cent to 53 per cent while the Coalition is down 5.5 per cent to 33.5 per cent. The Greens are up two points to 8 per cent. Furthermore:

• The Victorian Nationals have endorsed Bridget McKenzie, a university lecturer and former school teacher from Leongatha, for the safe number two position on the Coalition Senate ticket at the next election. McKenzie fills the position held at the 2004 election by Julian McGauran, who subsequently defected to the Liberals and will now be the number three candidate on the Coalition ticket, with Michael Ronaldson at number one.

Andrew Landeryou at VexNews reports that industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto has emerged as another challenger to Josh Frydenberg’s bid to succeed Petro Georgiou as Liberal member for Kooyong.

Imre Salusinszky of The Australian notes that beef stroganoff enthusiast John Murphy would almost certainly lose his seat of Lowe in the event that an early election required a “mini-redistribution” to reduce New South Wales to its required number of seats.

• The Australian Parliamentary Library has published a paper mapping poverty rates by federal electorate.

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.

930 comments on “Morgan: 61-39”

Comments Page 17 of 19
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  1. [On Possum’s recommendation I have now joined Twitter. I am now getting updates from Kevin Rudd every few minutes on how he is going with saving the world. Fantastic.]

    Adam ,if you try really really hard, you could end up as the chief Twit
    😉

  2. To treble unemployment as PM would have to show that your economic policies were a terrible failure.

    [Industrial production fell sharply during Thatcher’s government, which critics believe increased unemployment — which tripled during her premiership. When she resigned in 1990, 28% of the children in Great Britain were considered to be below the poverty line, a number that kept rising to reach a peak of 30% in 1994 during the Conservative government of John Major, who succeeded Thatcher.]

  3. Conspiracy theory 1:

    the link between the lindsay crew and the raaf (both serving and former) MAY turn up some interesting co-incidences and confluences.

  4. Conspiracy theory 2:

    certain fed Gvt depts ,among them the defend and protect category, have access to sites such as PB blocked cos they contain “prohibited content”. I am not sure of ALL gvt depts but have had confrimed 3 so far.

    Interestingly Conroys office have no knowledge (or so they said about an hour ago), tho I was told that each Dpts has it own “discretionary policies”

    v. interesting.

  5. To quote from Wikipedia (which is where Dio’s quote is from),

    [Most of the major British political parties today accept the anti-trade union legislation, privatisations and general free market approach to government that Thatcher’s governments installed. No major political party in the UK, at present, is committed to reversing the Thatcher governments reforms of the economy.]

    and

    [Moreover, the UK’s comparative macroeconomic performance has improved since the implementation of Thatcherite economic policies.]

  6. Swing Lowe

    [Moreover, the UK’s comparative macroeconomic performance has improved since the implementation of Thatcherite economic policies.]

    You could also view the same data as saying that the UK’s comparative macroeconomic performance has improved since Thatcher was ousted.

  7. There is a strong trend influence that affects peception of Thatchers performance for better and worse. As she took over after the oil crisis recession of 73/74 she was bound to preside over an improving economy regardless. Assessments of her performance are better done by comparing vs the OECD average, in which case she was better than her predecessor but not great. Conversely rising strucural unemployment was a problem all over the OECD while Thatcher was in power, as many menial jobs were replaced by automation. Dio is right; comparatively they did better under Blair since she was ousted, although that was also at the expense of piling up a mountain of private debt.

  8. Out of all the countries in the world, one would think Australians would understand the benefits of lower tariffs and privatisation. We have benefited the most (compared to other countries) from these.

    Thatcher merely reflected Bob Hawke and Paul Keating’s economic liberalisation in Australia in the 1980s. They too privatised government-owned industries (Qantas, CBA, Telecom Australia) much like Thatcher (British Telecom, British Airways, British Steel). They also significantly reduced union influence, albeit without the strident strike-busting tactics of Thatcher. All of these reforms set Australia up for the 16 consecutive years of growth from 1992 to 2008. Thatcher’s reforms did exactly the same thing for the UK…

  9. [Conversely rising strucural unemployment was a problem all over the OECD while Thatcher was in power, as many menial jobs were replaced by automation.]

    That happened in Australia too. It’s a by-product of microeconomic reform, as inefficient industries (e.g. Australian manufacturing, British coal mining) are abandoned and employment demand increases in industries where countries have a comparative advantage (e.g. financial services for both Australia and UK).

  10. Michael Cusack at 798, re job adds and shopping etc, our K.MART recently extended the hours it is open. Don’t know if they put on more staff.
    Hopefully the stockmarket has hit it’s lows as well 🙂 my old man says his super has gone up $2000 in the past couple of weeks

  11. There is a good article here at Barry Brook’s blog that gives some up to date data on comparison of life-cycle carbon footprints of different power sources. Note that nuclear, while still requiring significant energy to process fuel and build power plants, is still a good option, climate wise.
    http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/05/carbon-footprint-of-the-olympic-dam-uranium-mine-expansion/#more-1231

    There is a cosiderable upside for Australia if widespread carbon trading or taxes are introduced on coal – we have 40%+ of the world’s uranium. Time to start reviewing some policies.

  12. Swing Lowe

    I partly agree with that about Thatcher, but I wish you hadn’t used the example of “financial services”. They are a net cost to Australia. We don’t make much money as a country out of them; we export less of them than we import, hence a net cost burden.

    They are not a good people consume but rather a cost to their activities. Their rise simply means that reforms of the financial sectors world wide from the 80s on failed to deliver any benefits to society. The reforms enabled banks to extract more fees from people for the service of either loaning them someone else’s money, or giving them their own money back. The benefits were pocketed by finance firms, first for their shareholders and more recenly for themselves alone.

  13. Ok – a better example for Oz is resources production.

    That said, Australia has one of the world’s largest wealth management and hedge fund industries in the world, primarily because of the introduction of compulsory superannuation in the 1990s.

  14. It would be most premature to make any judgement on Obama’s performace as POTUS. He is at least quickly repairing relationships that Bush soured and regaining some credibility for the USA and I might will create some trust in the USA because he is not the dolt Bush was.

    As for getting Policy done and dusted we should remember that he has to deal with an environment ten times as complex and nasty as Rudd does back here.

    Geithner has come in for a lot of criticism and most of it I gather is because he is not Krugman. And it would be quite difficult to anybody not closely associated with Wall Street and Wall Street types in the US.

    I think we are going to get this ‘under performing, all promises and no action’ meme coming from the Republican press quite a bit to create the perception, and we can see already that it is working a little bit.

  15. [Conspiracy theory 2:

    certain fed Gvt depts ,among them the defend and protect category, have access to sites such as PB blocked cos they contain “prohibited content”. I am not sure of ALL gvt depts but have had confrimed 3 so far.

    Interestingly Conroys office have no knowledge (or so they said about an hour ago), tho I was told that each Dpts has it own “discretionary policies”

    v. interesting.]

    When I used to work in the WA Government public service the department I worked at just had a whitelist where only a few websites were allowed to be accessed (e.g. google, educational institutions etc.) That some websites would be restricted is not really surprising, nor necessarily bad (productivity wise).

  16. [And it would be quite difficult to anybody not closely associated with Wall Street and Wall Street types in the US.
    ]

    And it would be quite difficult to find anybody not closely associated in some way with Wall Street and Wall Street types in the US.

  17. Socrates 811

    It might be the case that digging up what little good quality uranium there is easily accessible now produces less carbon pollution than a coal-fired power electricity plant.

    However, that does not suggest that we should rapidly expand the nuclear energy industry or start digging up more. There is only 50-100 years of this stuff left at current usage rates and the power plants takes decades to pay for themselves. Thus it would be stupid to encourage more to be built.

    Sure, keep the current French and Chinese reactors going for now but we should be putting our efforts into getting renewable generation to replace fossil fuels now.

  18. Dr Good

    I suggest you read Brooks article – ignoring economics, in carbon terms it is NOT the case that modern reactors take decades to “pay for themselves”. Brooks shows a graph of the amount of carbon emissions required to generate a GW of power on a whole of life basis for several different energy sources in 3 countries. Nuclear and wind energy are the two best performers. There are other safety, political and cost issues with nuclear power, but Brooks is just looking at Carbon emissions, including what it takes to set up the power plants and extract the fuel. On that score they are hard ot beat , and the next generation of reactors peforms better.

    He has also dealt with the question of how many years of energy supply is let via uranium in previous posts which I would also recommend.

  19. Grog, Vera, et. al., (I don’t tip involving money personally)

    OT –

    [
    Profitable day for bookies in AFL

    Then there was the $30,000 on the Brisbane Lions at $3.15 to knock over the rampaging Blues. Severe pain.

    But not all wagers failed, although if you can make sense of this one, then please explain.

    A TAB Sportsbet punter had $46,000 on Geelong to beat Richmond at $1.05.

    Yes, he got the chocolates, but if you reckon risking $46,000 to win $2300 makes sense, particularly with the cats six points down in the last quarter, then good luck.

    http://tinyurl.com/dama2o
    ]

  20. [. Brooks shows a graph of the amount of carbon emissions required to generate a GW of power on a whole of life basis for several different energy sources in 3 countries]

    Not sure why Brooks is using a graph from 1999. There’s a study from last year demonstrating that in terms of CO2 per kWh nuclear is behind hydro, wind, solar thermal and in some cases, PV. This is still excluding waste issues.

  21. Conspiracy theory 2:

    certain fed Gvt depts ,among them the defend and protect category, have access to sites such as PB blocked cos they contain “prohibited content”. I am not sure of ALL gvt depts but have had confrimed 3 so far.

    Interestingly Conroys office have no knowledge (or so they said about an hour ago), tho I was told that each Dpts has it own “discretionary policies”

    No doubt the intelligence collecting agencies have the tightest policy of all, it is best to keep those sort of people in the dark.

  22. David Speers looked at the latest Essential Research Poll and what did he want to concentrate on? People’s view of China. Still don’t know what the figures are for each party.

  23. [David Speers looked at the latest Essential Research Poll and what did he want to concentrate on? People’s view of China. Still don’t know what the figures are for each party.]

    Well the Coalition getting absolutely slaughtered is hardly breaking news, is it 😉

  24. ruawake, what has happened to Steve Dickson? Uncerimoniously dumped from the Queensland Shadow cabinet without explanation.

  25. steve

    The Fiona faction lost Dickson, gained Elmes, but Simpson kept her old gig. Given the result of the second ballot was Langbroek 17, Nicholls 16. She will be the king maker. 🙂

  26. [What happened to my answer about whether “strong encryption” programs are used to make our emails etc unreadable to the Government or other interested bodies?]

    Diog, not too sure about the point of your question. Just like any lock, the more expensive the harder to crack. The free lock that comes with your luggage is basically useless. It depends on how strong is your encryption key and its pairing. But then, there is no point of having a golden lock on your front door if you leave your back window opens. 💡

  27. Socrates

    I meant that reactors take decades to pay themselves off in economic terms: construction, decommissioning costs and temporary storage of waste. Therefore it is not sensible to build a reactor if you are only going to use it for 20 years, say. Therefore it is not sensible to build new reactors which increase Uranium consumption much above current levels because cheap, accessible Uranium will run out before the new reactors have paid for themselves (in cash terms).

  28. I don’t imagine that Labor will pass up the opportunity to make life very difficult for Turnbull with the next budget. A thoroughly integrated budget difficult to break up would be the best. So trying block something means blocking something else that might be a popular measure.

    Have to keep an eye on the government’s prepositioning rhetoric over the next month.

  29. OK you lot stop writing Malcolms script for him 😉 he was on the news calling Rudd Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde. Now someone here last week said that’s what he’d say next lol.
    He also said Rudd is splashing around cash while he cuts back sevices in the Budget.
    How predictable, this bloke isn’t very original is he 🙂

  30. I think what my wife says has a lot of truth in it. She reckons she doesn’t like Turnbull just by seeing him and even less so on hearing him. That is a fairly big handicap if that is the effect he has on people generally, before they even isten to what he has to say.

  31. further to The Fins comment on internet news providers – how much does this guy sound like a railway tycoon bemoaning the rise of the automobile and plane:

    “There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.”

    Thomson, a former editor of The Times who was appointed editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal last May, said consumers must understand why they were paying a premium for content.

    “It’s certainly true that readers have been socialised — wrongly I believe — that much content should be free,” he said.

    “And there is no doubt that’s in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognise the value they are trading on that’s created by others.”

    Meantime Thomson said it was “amusing” to read media blogs and comment sites, all of which traded on other people’s information.

    “They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media,” he said. ]

    poor didums. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25293711-7582,00.html

  32. TP, you will advise us the next time Mrs Paine says something really stupid, won’t you? (Monty Python parodic female voice) “I don’t know, rights of man, rights of man, all day long. Why don’t you write something useful like that nice Mr Burke at No 15?”

  33. If MSM news sites don’t like Google indexing their sites all they need to do is put:

    No Follow
    No Index

    In their robots.txt file.

    Bet they won’t. 😛

  34. can anyone tell me when the stimpac money gets handed out? I have been bombarded with junk mail all offering stimpac specials.

  35. My wife recently read some Pollbludger threads and opined that Adam’s contributions were the most incisive, articulate and intelligent political comments she had ever read.

    But we now know how much significance we can now attach to that, don’t we.

  36. The first Stimpac came out before Christmas. A holy occaission!
    The second stimpac came out beore Easter. A very holy occaission!!
    Will the next Stimpac come out just before the Melbourne Cup? The most holy occaission!!!

  37. [TP, you will advise us the next time Mrs Paine says something really stupid,]

    Let me see, if someone said that about my wife to me here, I doubt they would be standing up for very long.

    My wife was sharing an unconscious reaction that she had to the person; it is valid and it is relevant even if it is never the way to judge a person and if Turnbull elicits similar reactions with others it is relevant. Image goes a long way into making a polly as well.

  38. SASgate, Liugate, shitstormgate, hostiegate and Lodge-gategate.

    Trouble is the whole dam lot of them don’t mount to a tin of beans.

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