Morgan: 58-42/54.5-45.5

Unpredictable Roy Morgan has unloaded two very different sets of poll results: one using its usual face-to-face methodology, but based on one week’s sample rather than the recently more usual two, and the other a phone poll in which respondents were also asked about leadership preference, contrary to normal Morgan practice. The face-to-face poll is from 999 respondents, and shows Labor’s lead narrowing from 60-40 to 58-42. Labor’s primary vote is down 0.5 per cent to 49.5 per cent, while the Coalition is up a quite healthy 3.5 per cent to a still not-healthy 37.5 per cent. The Greens are down a point to 8 per cent.

However, the phone poll has Labor’s two-party lead at a more modest 54.5-45.5, from primary votes of 45 per cent Labor, 40.5 per cent Coalition and 7.5 per cent Greens. At present, a dedicated page for the phone poll result tells us only that Kevin Rudd leads Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 60.5 per cent to 26.5 per cent; that Rudd’s approval rating is 57.5 per cent; and that Turnbull’s approval rating is 43 per cent. Perhaps it will be fleshed out with more information at a later time.

Two other pieces of news:

• It seems Andrew Wilkie will run as an independent candidate for Denison at next year’s Tasmanian state election. Wilkie is the former Office of National Assessments analyst who quit over the Howard government’s actions before the Iraq war, and subsequently ran as a Greens candidate against John Howard in Bennelong in 2004 and as Bob Brown’s Tasmanian Senate running mate in 2007.

• A beleagured British Labour Party is considering sweeping electoral reforms, including an elected upper house. House of Commons reforms might presumably include some kind of preferential voting, which Britain’s three-plus party system badly needs, or more radically proportional representation, with which Britons have become familiar through elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, its members of European Parliament, and local government.

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.

1,320 comments on “Morgan: 58-42/54.5-45.5”

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  2. I think this is hilarious. The Libs have finally got Rudd to say the magic words but they can’t use them in their ads because the ABC provided the footage.]

    Or more precisely, they cannot use audio or video from ANY Parliamentry Broadcast because it would be in breach of the act 🙂

  3. * Astrobleme: Various partition schemes had been suggested in the 20s and 30s, but both the Zionists and Arabs rejected them. The 1947 Partition Plan was a UN scheme. The British accepted it faux de mieux, but their preference was a united Palestinian state which would have had an Arab majority.
    * Diogenes: I’m not aware that any Zionist group carried out military or terrorist actions in Britain or against “the British people”. They attacked British troops and officials in Palestine. (Thay also assassinated Count Bernadotte, the Swedish mediator.)
    * Socrates: There had never been a Palestinian Arab state. “Palestine” as a geographical area was invented by the British. Under Ottoman rule the area was part of the province of Syria and very thinly populated. Before the Ottomans arrived the area had been ruled by various caliphates in Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus. Zionist settlement from the 1890s led to economic development and a rapid increase in both Jewish and Arab immigration – the majority of modern Palestinians are descended from people who migrated to the area over the past 120 years. Nearly all modern Jews have “Middle Eastern ancestry” – they are descended from the ancient Israelites, as has been proved by DNA testing. Re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine wasn’t a European idea, it was a Jewish idea.

  4. [I think this is hilarious. The Libs have finally got Rudd to say the magic words but they can’t use them in their ads because the ABC provided the footage.]
    I must admit I don’t know why the government doesn’t just say what the numbers are.

    The Liberals could make an attack advert for the next election featuring Rudd and Swan NOT saying what the figures are.

    It’s up to the Government to explain why that debt is justifiable, and to explain that the opposition wouldn’t actually do anything different.

  6. Socrates @ 1195

    “The British were resigned to getting out of Palestine, but they intended handing it over to the Arabs, and allowing mass Jewish immigration would have upset that plan.”

    Isn’t that “handing it over to the Arabs” the Zionist spin? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “handing it back”? The Arabs were the legal and traditional owners of most of the land we now call Israel. When the Ottoman Turkish and then British Empires left they had just as legitimate an expectation to getting their independance back as any other conquered people. Most of the Jewish persons who emigrated to Israel did not have any middle eastern ancestry – they were displaced Europeans, not descendants of the diaspora. It was very convenient for Europeans for them to go to Palestine, but not for the Palestinians.

    The question at the time was: should this territory be granted independence as a single state, or should it be divided into two states? ‘It used to be a single state’ wouldn’t be the basis for a fair settlement at the time, even if it had been true, which it hadn’t. There was never a sovereign Arab Palestine. Before the Turks came it was ruled from Baghdad. I also don’t see how the ancestry of the Jewish inhabitants is relevant. The Arabs were a majority, but if you take that as a valid argument against Jewish independence, how would it not be an equally valid argument against Irish independence, Eritrean independence, or Slovenian independence?

  7. Psephos
    “Re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine wasn’t a European idea, it was a Jewish idea.”
    I thought it was Balfour’s idea… The English, MP? Maybe or diplomat. He went to Russia in 1917 to tempt Jewish people into continuing to fight the Germans (as the Ruskies were about to fold) by saying he would create a Jewish state. That’s what precipitated a large influx of Jews after the first world war.

  8. Astrobleme @ 1207

    Herzl and the World Zionist Organisation came before Balfour. And the idea of re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine predates Herzl and the World Zionist Organisation. Modern Zionist/proto-Zionist migration to Palestine dates back to the 1880s.

  9. In 1947 there were 1.3 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living in Palestine. Given that the two communities apparently could not live in a single state, a 2-for-1 partition was deemed by the UN to be a fair solution. The Jews (reluctantly) accepted this plan, the Arabs rejected it outright. Had the Arabs accepted the plan, there would now have been a Palestinian state for 60 years, and one a lot larger than any which could possibly now be created. Everything that has happened in the Middle East since then flows from that Arab rejection.

  10. [Interesting re the light rail proposal. I don’t know any details of the Sydney one but it is certainly cheaper to extend an existing system than build a new metro from scratch.]

    One of the main reasons this proposed extension of the Sydney light rail would be so cheap in comparison is that it would be using an existing goods rail line. There is no need for any land purchases or costs of implementing new road crossings or road sharing. Actually, my guess would be that new rolling stock would be at least half of the cost.

  12. Oh, and Arthur Balfour (later Earl of Balfour) was the former Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition who issued the Balfour Declaration as Foreign Secretary in 1917. I never heard that he went to Russia, though, and suspect that you have your facts garbled.

  13. J-D

    Well I stand corrected.
    I suppose though that the Balfour declaration made the Jewish state possible.
    If the British hadn’t taken over quite probably they could never have formed Israel, it would still be part of Turkey.

  14. I think Balfour’s declaration was pitched more at Jewish opinion in the US than in Russia, but I haven’t gone into that. In any case the Balfour Declaration was a response to Zionism, not the cause of it. The modern Zionist movement was launched by Herzl in resonse to the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s. But the Jews had never forgotten their ancestry in Eretz Israel and there had always been some Jewish migration to Palestine.

  16. Psephos
    “In 1947 there were 1.3 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living in Palestine. Given that the two communities apparently could not live in a single state, a 2-for-1 partition was deemed by the UN to be a fair solution. The Jews (reluctantly) accepted this plan, the Arabs rejected it outright. Had the Arabs accepted the plan, there would now have been a Palestinian state for 60 years, and one a lot larger than any which could possibly now be created. Everything that has happened in the Middle East since then flows from that Arab rejection.”

    That’s not a very balanced view though is it? The UN basically decreed that the partition should take place despite the majority voting no. I thought you liked Democracy, surely if the people vote no, you shouldn’t force it on them.

  17. Diogenes: first I’ve heard of it. Anyway the Zionist terrorists were a small minority whose tactics were rejected by Ben Gurion and the other Zionist leaders. The state of Israel was not created by their actions. Jews at that time were overwhelmingly Labour Zionist in their politics. The right didn’t come to power in Israel until 1977.

  18. J-D

    I just finished reading Geoffery Blainey’s Short History of the 20th Century… Maybe you should blame him for my mis-factoids 🙂

  19. Astrobleme @ 1216

    That’s not a very balanced view though is it? The UN basically decreed that the partition should take place despite the majority voting no. I thought you liked Democracy, surely if the people vote no, you shouldn’t force it on them.

    Democracy tells you that decisions for the group should be made by the majority of the group, but it doesn’t tell you how the group should be made up in the first place. The majority in the whole of mandatory Palestine was Arab, but the majority in the part allocated by the UN for a Jewish state was Jewish. Which majority should decide? This is the point I was making at the end of my comment above (1206).

  20. [The UN basically decreed that the partition should take place despite the majority voting no.]

    There was never a vote in Palestine on the partition plan. Of course such a plebiscite would have produced a No vote, because there were more Arabs than Jews within the boundaries of the Mandate. But the point was that this was not one political community which could make decisions by majority vote. It was two political communities which could not or would not live in the same state. If an Arab state had been formed in Palestine, 650,000 Jews would have been expelled, on top of the million stateless Jews already in Europe.

  21. J-D

    “The majority in the whole of mandatory Palestine was Arab, but the majority in the part allocated by the UN for a Jewish state was Jewish. Which majority should decide? This is the point I was making at the end of my comment above (1206).”

    I see this as a poor argument. Apparently the UN decided the whole of the Mandate of Palestine got to vote. Trying to argue that just the area dominated by Jewish people should have got to vote on Partition is a bit strange.

  22. Jusy watched a thing on the telly about the assasination of William McKinley, after being shot he was taken by an “electric” ambulance to the Pan-American Exposition medical centre.

    An electric ambulance (they showed a picture). When I was a kid in England (early 60s), our milk and bread was deleivered by electric vehicles.

    Who killed the electric vehicle?

  25. Psephos

    This makes me curious:
    “It was two political communities which could not or would not live in the same state.”

    How would you describe these two political communities?

  26. There are few subjects more clouded in myth and propaganda than Israel-Palestine. It’s not surprising that people believe all sorts of things which aren’t true. Joan Peters, using the Ottoman archives, demonstrated 20 years ago that most of the modern Palestinian Arab population is descended from people from other Arab countries who migrated to Palestinian after 1890 in response to the economic opportunities created by Jewish settlement and investment. Palestine as it existed in 1947 was a land populated by *two* immigrant peoples who could not or would not live together in one state. Neither had a superior claim to the whole territory. That’s why the UN proposed partition, and had that plan been accepted, we would have had Israel and Palestine as neighbours for 60 years. It was the decision of the Palestinian leader al-Husseini (who had spent World War II in Berlin) and the Arab states to reject partition that led to all the subsequent sad events.

  27. [How would you describe these two political communities?]

    I would describe them as Jews and Arabs. (Is that what you meant? If not, you’ll have to be more specific.)

  28. Psephos

    I am not trying to argue that the Palestinian Arabs had more ‘right’ to the land. I’m not even arguing.

  29. Psephos
    Yeah, that’s good enough.

    So how would you describe their relationship prior to the establishment of the Mandate? During Ottoman rule.

  30. I think Jewish-Arab relations under the Ottomans were reasonably harmonious. The area was very backward and thinly populated. The coastal area where Tel Aviv now is was a malarial swamp, and most of the Arab population were poor farmers in the upland areas around Hebron and Nablus. It was Jewish immigration and investment that stimulated economic growth and provided employment for the growth of the Arab population. I don’t believe there was any communal strife in the area until the 1920s when Jewish immigration began to accelerate and Arab nationalism began to develop.

  31. “I don’t believe there was any communal strife in the area until the 1920s when Jewish immigration began to accelerate and Arab nationalism began to develop.”

    So the link here is that Arab nationalism grew from Jewish immigration. Why do you think that happened? If they had been living harmoniously up to that point?

  32. Detroit used to make cars – I am sure that they did not care if the were electric, petrol or chook poo powered.

    I was surprised that there was an electric vehicle in 1901 (probably not the earliest).

    I wonder what may have happened if rockerfeller did not get a monopoly on kerosine?

  33. Psephos 1226

    Who are you defining as Palestinians? It is not only an arab/Jewish question. There are Marionite Christians who have lived in what the British called Palestine for a thousand years.

    I accept the figures in your post 1209, but just because the Arabs (foolishly) rejected partition, doesn’t give the smaller side the right to annex most of the country. A large number of people have been dispalced from their homes in a manner which is still fundamentally unjust. Hence these days I have little sympathy for the Israeli Jewish cause.

    Also, what is your source for this:
    Nearly all modern Jews have “Middle Eastern ancestry” – they are descended from the ancient Israelites, as has been proved by DNA testing. Re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine wasn’t a European idea, it was a Jewish idea.

    I have heard conflicting claims. I am not expect on the genetics , but I find it odd, since from my understanding of history many eastern eurpoean jews trace their ancestry from the conversion of a tribe called the Khazars to Judaism in the time of the Byzantines.

  34. Ru
    we would have had runaway cc sooner?

    Victoria is the biggest ggg emitter not because of its car use but because of its electricity.

    There are countries which have far more cars than we do who emit far less.

  36. Dario 1210

    Thanks – in that case the Light Rail extension should be quick and cheap as you say. Also a separate alignment means higher track capacity due to no road traffic impediment. The main costs would be rolling stock, catenary wiring, and a power substation to supply the wires.

  37. The rise of Arab nationalism was a general phenomenon of the period, stimulated by British efforts to stimulate an Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I and the spread of western political ideas in the Arab world. The Arabs were rightly angry that the British and French broke their promises of Arab self-government and instead partitioned the Arab world between them.

  38. Just speculating here, but do you think that the Arab nationalism could have grown in opposition to Jewish nationalism?

  40. This has to be the most civil and enlightening discussion on the ME we’ve had for a while.

    ruawake

    At one stage 25% of cars in the US in the early 20th C were electric. They died out because of the frequent recharging problem. Steam cars were also popular but they took too long to warm up.

  44. I was highly amused by Bob Brown on the radio this morning.

    He’s blocking the bill in the interests of saving the world, whereas the Libs are blocking the bill to be obstructionist.

    Blocking the bill is blocking the bill. The purity of your motives don’t change the outcome.

    A bit like Fielding saying that voting against the alcopops tax put the distillers on notice!

  45. [The meddling of the Americans has caused a lot of conflicts as well.]

    Well, yes, but the Israel-Palestine mess is mostly a British-French creation. If they had kept their promise to the Arabs, Syria (including Palestine) would have become an independent state in 1918 and the Zionist movement would have fizzled away because Jewish settlement of Palestine would not have been possible. What would then have happened with the Jewish refugees in the 30s and 40s I have no idea.

  47. [I was highly amused by Bob Brown on the radio this morning.

    He’s blocking the bill in the interests of saving the world, whereas the Libs are blocking the bill to be obstructionist.

    Blocking the bill is blocking the bill. The purity of your motives don’t change the outcome.

    A bit like Fielding saying that voting against the alcopops tax put the distillers on notice!]

    And the oh so pure are now ensuring that there will NEVER be a CPRS enshrined in legislation.

    Bob Brown is slowly turning into a male Meg Lees.

  48. Psephos
    You never know, if the Arabs had been granted homelands way back then, they may have even been able to fix in a Jewish homeland at the same time. I get the feeling that the animosity between the groups had been allowed to grow for too long before there was any attempt to resolve it.

  49. [Fascinating that the Greens and Nats are in bed itogether in their demands to bring on the Governmen’t CPRS legislation so they can defeat it. Such cosy collaborationists joining together to ignore the need to address climate change.]

    First Fremantle, now this – The Greens are becoming more like the Coalition everyday.

  50. Zoomster

    “The purity of your motives don’t change the outcome.”

    See! You do see his motives as ‘pure’… I knew you were green at heart! Like a… ummm what’s a fruit that’s red on the outside and green in the middle…
    🙂

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