Essential Research: 56-44

The latest weekly Essential Research survey has Labor’s two-party lead down from 57-43 to 56-44. Also featured are questions on carbon emission targets (evenly divided between 80 per cent by 2050 and 60 per cent), the state of the economy in face of the global slowdown (worst believed to be over), whether Australian companies “should accept the laws and justice systems of those countries even if they are very different from our own” (yes), the government’s handling of the Stern Hu issue (somewhat favourable), whether the Prime Minister’s experience with China will help govenrment in dealing with the issue (no), and the ban on climbing Uluru (opposed). Elsewhere:

• Put a mark around Friday in your diaries as the day the Australian Electoral Commission is due to publish proposed boundaries for the federal redistribution in Queensland, which is gaining a thirtieth seat.

• Dennis Jensen, the Liberal member for Tangney, has been defeated in the local preselection vote by Glenn Piggott, from a field that also included Alcoa government relations manager Libby Lyons. The West Australian reports that Piggott won on the first round with the support of 20 branch delegates against 10 for Jensen and eight for “spoiler candidate” Libby Lyons (who unlike Piggott lives not locally but in the western suburbs, having earlier tried her hand at the state preselection for Nedlands). There is still the possibility that the result will be overturned by the party’s State Council on Saturday, as it was before the 2007 election when Jensen was initially defeated by Matt Brown. However, The West Australian report baldly states that Jensen “appears certain to lose his seat”. The only facts that gan be gleaned about Piggott from this remove is that he is a 52-year-old finance manager with Toyota.

• Another weekend preselection challenge proved to be a non-event when AMWU official and Geelong councillor Andy Richards withdrew from his tilt against Maria Vamvakinou in the safe Labor Melbourne seat of Calwell. Richards has attracted his fair share of critics: AMWU colleague Ian Jones launched a colourful spray quoted at length in The Australian, describing him as “dead wood” and “unsuitable for public office”, while federal MP Darren Cheeseman (whose electorate of Corangamite partly coincides with his council turf) made no effort to spare Richards’ feelings in a letter to Calwell preselectors. Beyond that, one can surmise that Richards’ withdrawal was influenced by peace deals between rival sub-factions of the Right, one of which was threatening to back Richards in defiance of a “stability pact” protecting the candidates of Left powerbroker Senator Kim Carr, among them Vamvakinou. Andrew Landeryou at vexNews reported last week that two state preselection challenges had been shelved under similar circumstances: Darebin councillor Tim Laurence dropped his bid to topple incumbent Steve Herbert in Eltham, and Fiona Richardson was spared a seemingly derisory challenge in Northcote from Kathleen Matthews-Ward, a Moreland councillor reportedly associated with the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association.

• Andrew Landeryou also reports that the state Liberal member for Sandringham, Murray Thompson, faces a preselection challenge from Margaret Fitzherbert. They are respectively said to be associated with the Peter Costello and Ted Baillieu factions.

• The Maribyrnong Leader reports youth worker Les Twentyman, who contested last year’s contentious Kororoit by-election, denies reports he will run against Labor member Marsha Thomson in Footscray, but says he will “look at” the possibility of running in an unspecified electorate if his health improves (he is “still recovering from surgery complications which threatened his life”).

• In case you missed it, George Megalogenis of The Australian provided the authoritative word last week on what an increased Labor majority at the next election might look like. Money quote:

Of the top 50 seats for tradesmen, 23 are marginal: 14 Liberal and nine Labor. A number of blue-collar Liberal seats proved hard to shift at the 2007 election, including Bowman and Herbert in Queensland, McEwen and La Trobe in Victoria and Macarthur and Paterson in NSW. All but Paterson had been solid Labor seats in the 1980s, swung to the Coalition in the 1990s because of the fallout from the last recession, and remained rusted on to the Howard government throughout the nation’s longest boom.

• I’ve added a thorough update to my ongoing post on Tasmania’s Pembroke upper house by-election.

• Another entry to the to-do list: a South Australian government proposal to reform the upper house through an end to staggered eight-year terms and a populist cut in numbers to below the point of effectiveness. This could be put to the voters at a referendum coinciding with the state election next March. However, legislation initiating the referendum will first have to pass the upper house itself.

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.

1,426 comments on “Essential Research: 56-44”

Comments Page 2 of 29
1 2 3 … 29

  1. Just watching the cricket now, including the list of Australian dismissalms, I apologise if this has been discussed already

    Thinking of some of the betting scandals in modern cricket, has an umpire ever been accused of being nobbled?

    How about being sent off for some career counseling? Performance management etc

    Jesus…

  3. [Figures given exclusively to The Daily Telegraph revealed an alarming rate of almost four crashes a day from January 2008 until now.]

    But did the Tele get the numbers right?

  4. Yes Chamberlain and the rest of Europe sold out the Czechs and the Germans too…

    Considering we made 400 in the second dig and 3 of our wickets were rubbish thanks to poor umpiring that’s a fair effort…

    Still would love to beat the poms on the last day of the last match to retain the ashes 😀

  6. 40 years anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow. Who can remember what they were doing?

    I remember school coming to a complete halt as we watched the astronauts on their epic journey. 100 kids looking at black and white images from a distance.

    It also snowed in Melbourne that day. Kids were moving from one wonder to another. Cured me of being a snow bunny.

  7. Psephos @ 41

    I did say “I”, not “we”. One’s heroes are a personal choice.

    As a kid growing up in the 1940s-50s when the war ended less than a decade ago, Die Weiße Rose was up there with Douglas Bader, the Dam Busters, Colditz, Guy Gibson, Nancy Wake, Odette Churchill, Violet Szabo, Weary Dunlop, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel et cet as true heroes one’s family, friends, teachers discussed often in reverent tones. Die Weiße Rose was even bigger at the Helidon Sandstone Repository of “Light, Liberty & Learning” where its members were heroes.

    Remember that, because of Ghandi and the USA Civil Rights Movement (1953 Baton Rouge bus strike, 1955 Rosa Parks) non-violent resistance was very highly respected- even though, at the time, Rosa & Martin Luther King were a great deal further from the centre of power than Weiße Rose – Universität München is only a few minutes’ walk from the Odeonsplatz memorial to those killed in Hitler’s Nov 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and its inscription: Und ihr habt doch gesiegt. And yet still thou hast conquered.

    The July 20th Plot had nothing like Weiße Rose’s stature; perhaps because one would expect senior military officers not to have made – to put it kindly – so many ‘unforced errors’ (it could well be described as “incompetent”, “amateur”, had been pretty much from the beginning), some members had considerable “baggage” (from pre-war beginnings, there had been more than a whiff of Old Guard Officer Corps about the plotters), others changed sides. Allied sympathy for Rommel probably accounted for much of the early unsympathetic coverage (by British & American authors) of what was seen as a bungled effort that led to Rommel’s death.

    It was covered, fairly unsympathetically, by allied authors (Desmond Youg in the first ed of “Rommel The Desert Fox” (1950).

  9. Oh, dear! It seems some things are ok for the LNP but not Labor.

    [QUEENSLAND Liberal National Party leader John-Paul Langbroek has invoked the “Gordon Nuttall defence” by claiming that businesses who paid money to meet shadow ministers at his party’s state conference received nothing that ordinary Queenslanders would not get.

    The first annual conference of the Queensland Liberal National Party, formed just under a year ago to contest the Queensland election, was held on the weekend, with a price tag of $3300 for business observers.

    While the ALP and other parties have business observers programs, the LNP has taken the process a step further at this conference by arranging specific meetings with shadow ministers as part of the deal.

    But Mr Langbroek, who was elected as leader after Lawrence Springborg failed to win office for the LNP in the March election, said that those who attended the conference would receive no special favours.

    When asked what the business attendees had received for their money, Mr Langbroek said that he was happy to talk to businesses as part of the process of LNP policy formulation. ]

    And the hypocrisy involved in this harks back to the recent bunch of election promises that the LNP had no intention to keep or implement.

    [Mr Langbroek also told yesterday’s conference that if his party won office, it would consider reinstating the 8c-a-litre petrol subsidy when Queensland regained its AAA credit rating.

    Mr Langbroek said the Coalition would like to see Queensland, which had its credit rating downgraded earlier this year as a result of going heavily into debt for the next eight years, have its AAA credit rating restored within four to five years of the LNP winning office.

    But he stopped short of committing the LNP to bringing back the subsidy if the AAA credit rating were regained, saying that many things could happen before then, including the rise of electric cars.]

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25806501-5013404,00.html

  11. GG: Had a few hours pw teaching at the SHS in the town where OH was stationed & was roped into supervising local high school kids who were scattered in various teachers & parents’ homes – I was at the home of one of the English teachers (& sat in a chintz-covered chair – can still “see” the pattern – in a corner on the street side). It was quite a cool day. I wore a mustard coloured suit & brown suede fringed boots (it was 1969!) It was quite tense – there was every possibility the lander would crash or be unable to lift off again. We waited for ages & couldn’t see much (B&W TV) when Armstrong did land.

    We all thought man would be on Mars by 1980. Instead, Tricky Dicky was more interested in power & control, Iran distracted the USA & Afghanistan the USSR and both dropped the ball. Reagan & the Bushes were more interested in unimaginative NeoCon “Greed is good” and silly bugger wars in the Middle East. It was as if no one followed Columbus’s last voyage to the Americas.

    By far the biggest disappointment of my life. Hope the Russians soon pull off on a secret mission to Mars & re-start the whole programme.

  12. [40 years anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow. Who can remember what they were doing?]

    I was at work and about 200 klms from the nearest TV.

  13. I was at school, and very annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to stay home and watch it all day, as many others did. We had to watch it in the gym with one TV a long way from where I was sitting.

    Watching the takeoff was actually more exciting, because we got up at 4am to watch it, so it was a big adventure.

  14. [It was as if no one followed Columbus’s last voyage to the Americas.]

    Well not really. There’s actually nothing on the moon worth going back to see, unlike the New World. The whole space program was a Cold War prestige exercise, it had and has very little practical value.

    [By far the biggest disappointment of my life. Hope the Russians soon pull off on a secret mission to Mars & re-start the whole programme.]

    The Russians have plenty of other things to worry about at the moment, as do the rest of us. We can spend trillions of dollars going to Mars after we’ve fixed up things here on Earth.

  15. Psephos,

    The Indonesians, Chinese and other near neighbours have always said the same thing about Australia

  16. [The whole space program was a Cold War prestige exercise, it had and has very little practical value.]

    You kidding? We got velcro!

  19. I’d rather go to Mars…

    After all we’re going to have to leave Earth one day, the longer we wait the longer it will take us in the end…

  24. Adam

    [We can spend trillions of dollars going to Mars after we’ve fixed up things here on Earth.]

    I say go to Mars…we’ll always have problems on earth!

  25. [I say go to Mars…we’ll always have problems on earth!]
    We will always have an urge to explore and find out new things about our planet and beyond, it is something that makes us human. Even theologians tried to figure out how the solar system is organised, even if they ultimately came up with implausible explanations.

  28. So looks like he knew he was a goner come the next election and he’s jumped off the sinking ship wreck of the WA ALP…

    All this talk of them winning lots of seats in WA may not occur even when due given the disasterous state of that branch lol!

    On ya Vince, Billy Hughes would be proud 😀

  29. [[The Labor backbencher Vince Catania has quit the party to join the Nationals.

    Mr Catania was elected as the Labor Member for North West last year.}]

    The average IQ of both parties went up markedly apparently.
    😉

  32. I wonder if Vince has jumped ship so his electorate can benifit from Royalties fore Regions – especially as non conservative rural seats weren’t getting any funding but National Seats were.

  33. I see my previous comments identified those on the forum who are train drivers or their friends/ relatives. But I still haven’t seen any reliable up to date information about their average current incomes, compared to what Diogenes posted on doctors salaries (in SA) and mine for engineers.

    The links to train drives awards were up to five years out of date and refered to minimums not actual incomes. All of the train driver examples of actual incomes I know in Qld, NSW and SA are higher than those quoted. Maybe they are just a collection of lucky individuals, but if so can you give a reliable source for average incomes of train drivers ? I’d be interested to see it.

    I have known a few train drivers through work and privately. None of them were fools, and I wasn’t trying to denigrate train driving. It is a needed task and we will need more of them in the near future. But it is overpaid. Many of them still get pay and conditions lost by most others two decades ago. It isn’t especially stressful. They don’t have to do any years of unpaid training; its a pay scale they work their way up. They have schedules, road signaling rules, working and speed instructions to learn. So does the average delivery driver on minimum pay. It takes 60+ weeks to qualify as a driver, but that doesn’t mean it takes that long to learn. Think you see upsetting things on the tracks? Try talking to a policeman or nurse. Think your job is responsible? How much do you pay in professional indemnity insurance?

    Everyone would like to get more, but the real question is if people other than those in an occupation think its pay is too high/low. I don’t hear too many non-train drivers saying train drivers are underpaid. Whereas most would agree nurses are.

    Their particular union has done an admirable job protecting their interests compared to others, but in so doing it illustrates the tribalism in some parts of Labor that makes it distasteful to others (me). Any way there is no point debating this further.

  34. [The Labor backbencher Vince Catania has quit the party to join the Nationals.

    Mr Catania was elected as the Labor Member for North West last year]

    Frickin’ rats. They should be forced to resign their seat and recontest it with their new party if they wish to change.

  36. [Frickin’ rats. They should be forced to resign their seat and recontest it with their new party if they wish to change.]

    I do hope that this would also apply if it was a Liberal, National or heaven forbid a Greens MP ?

  37. Ripper isn’t Happy, to say the least.

    [Labor leader Eric Ripper said State Secretary Simon Mead had accepted Mr Catania’s resignation late this afternoon and it was effective immediately.

    “Mr Catania is no longer a member of the Australian Labor Party,” Mr Ripper said.

    “The people of the North West have been let down and they deserved better. Less than a year after they voted for a Labor member it seems they will now be lumbered with a member willing to betray his party and all the promises he made during the election campaign.

    “I find this decision particularly surprising given that during the last sitting week of parliament I had to counsel Mr Catania against calling Nationals Leader Brendon Grylls a liar in the chamber.

    “I call on Mr Grylls to tell the people of the North West exactly what he has promised Mr Catania in return for his support.”

    Mr Ripper said he had recently found it necessary to counsel Mr Catania about his level of engagement with his marginal North West electorate.

    “I expressed concern about his lack of presence in the electorate and about the performance of his office,” Mr Ripper said.

    “Mr Catania has now joined a Party which supported the draconian WorkChoices legislation and opposes action on climate change.

    “He has shown himself to be an opportunist, lacking in both character and principle.”]

    http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25811997-948,00.html

  39. I don`t think even one single elected Green has defected. The defectors to the Greens in SA and Qld were not particularly good for the Greens and maybe they should not have been excepted.

  42. [To WA Labor – Suffer in your Jocks lol!]

    Somehow the people who voted for Vince won’t be too impressed – especially the workers.

  43. Catania joining the Nats?!?

    That’s…the most bizarre political defection I can think of in a rather long time. Good riddance to him, though.

  48. Hmm, from a later ABC Story.

    [The Labor leader Eric Ripper has labelled Mr Catania an opportunist, and says the people of the North West have been let down by his decision.

    Mr Ripper dismisses suggestions the move is a vote of no-confidence in his leadership, instead saying it reflects Mr Catania’s preparedness to sell-out.

    But Mr Catania rejects Mr Ripper’s criticism and says he quit because he was frustrated with a party that ignored the needs of regional WA.]

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/21/2631448.htm

  49. Psephos, the space programme was (and remains) tremendously beneficial to scientific progress and I think the US and other nations should continue their investments in expanding mankind’s horizons.

    I, for one, think that the Chinese will be more active in this area sooner or later given that they are far more cashed up than developed Western nations and Russia. Obama certainly has zero breathing space after spending a few trillion dollars he doesn’t have – adding to the egregious debt cycle propagated by George Bush.

    As for those questioning the reason why the US has not returned to the moon: the reason is that the efforts to get there the first time were funded with an essentially unlimited budget. These days, budget constraints mean that NASA doesn’t envisage a return to the moon for at least a decade, and that’s dependent on the new space vehicles (replacement for the soon-to-be-decommissioned space shuttles) being problem-free and ready to be deployed by that time.

  50. Its not my field of engineering but I agree with Glen on going to Mars. The US space program was still a drop in the bucket compared to the overall US economy. But it provided a focus to research that drove great innovations for two decades. The silicon chip, ceramics and many others are all by products of the US space program. The money was not wasted; it generated new activities and new ideas.

    Yet the main reason to go is not economic or scientific. Why not explore the universe simply because we are here and we can? I hope we never become so disinterested in the world/ universe beyond ourselves that we don’t have the intellectual curiosity to discover new things other than what is simply useful. If we stop searching we will stop learning.

Comments are closed.

Comments Page 2 of 29
1 2 3 … 29