The latest bi-monthly Newspoll survey of state voting intention in New South Wales (sample size 1266) is a status quo result in every particular, although the Coalition’s two-party lead is down from 55-45 to 54-46. On the primary vote, Labor is up one to 32 per cent, Liberal up one to 37 per cent, Nationals down one to 4 per cent and the Greens steady on 14 per cent. Nathan Rees is up on both approval (three points to 33 per cent) and disapproval (two points to 51 per cent), as is Barry O’Farrell (approval and disapproval both up two from 34 per cent to 36 per cent). The preferred premier rating has nudged from 33-32 in Rees’s favour to 33-32 in O’Farrell’s favour.
When Rudd took over Labor, polls were up to 60/40, averaging 57/43, and Rudd always maintained a healthy lead over Howard on Preferred PM.
NSW Labor is certainly on the nose, but like most Liberal leaders, O’Farrell just can’t impress.
Agree, bob1234. He gets as much traction as a curling stone. And how little media time does he manage to grab? The gaps between appearances are so long his earlobes have grown noticeably every time I see him.
But I’m still going to vote for the hapless fools, next time. Even if they are even worse/even less competent than the current mob (and they are, let me tell you).
Everyone in the State must help get rid of Labor- then toss the Liberals out after one term. Then repeat and repeat and repeat, until they start getting an inkling that changes may be required…
O’Farrell may be hapless, but there are some very religious-nut types lurking in the NSW Libs that scare me far more.
Kersebleptes, if I were in NSW, I might just take advantage of my usually hated optional preference voting, and vote only for left-leaning non-major candidates…
But I do agree that NSW having a one-term Liberal government will do Labor, and the state, some good. Labor needs to be thrown out to give it the chance to renew itself.
4# I don’t understand that. While you may not like NSW Labor, they clearly have at least a bit more in common with the Greens than the Libs do. The lesser of two evils is still better than the worse.
Just reading Central magazine, Clover Moore dismisses rumours that she won’t run for Sydney again.
Bah, enough with “preferred Premier” numbers. The voting intentions are clear. Labor won’t be getting many preferences from “others” and will get far fewer from the Greens than before – even if they do stitch up a preference deal which they probably will.
re: Hamish @7 NSW Labor has sod all to do with the Greens. They’re not very socially liberal or environmentally conscious for starters. And Labor is packed to the rafters with religious social conservatives, just because none of them are as nuts as David Clarke doesn’t mean they don’t have lots of them.
Kersebleptes has it right on – anti-incumbent voting until a government gets it right. I voted for a Lib government in 07 and will do again in ’11 for all the good it will do in Tebbutt’s seat.
[4# I don’t understand that. While you may not like NSW Labor, they clearly have at least a bit more in common with the Greens than the Libs do. The lesser of two evils is still better than the worse.]
Because with NSW Labor, their voters will have to be cruel to be kind. Vote as many MPs out this election so lots of fresh blood can be brought in. Labor needs a stint in opposition.
[Mr Rees said that the poll would not distract him, and revealed that he spent 17 hours of his day on the job.
While he appeared calm as he discussed his leadership, Mr Rees became a little agitated when asked how it felt to be working such long hours for little pay-off.
“How do you think?” he snapped.]
http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-work-17-hours-a-day-for-the-people-of-nsw-rees-20090819-epyp.html
And yet these aren’t great results for the NSW Libs either, they should be a good 20 points ahead, I still think O’Farrell will get replaced by Mike Baird before 2011.
As for Rees, he’s a shocker, but sadly the alternatives ain’t much better.
We in New South Wales are basically screwed, it might be an improvement if the entire state government is abolished and we’re taken over by the Feds.
even14,
That sounds good at the moment- but wouldn’t have three years ago.
State governments in Australia can effectively shield people from competent government (the function that the NSWelsh Govt is carrying out with aplomb at the moment), but they can also help shield us from scumbags.
That said, yes we’re screwed.
aplomb, now there’s a word I havent heard in a while…
What do people think that the chance of the Libs directing preferences to the Greens in Balmain, Marrickville and maybe Heffron?
I think that Balmain will go Green regardless of Liberal preferences. Marrickville will probably depend on Lib preferences and Heffron probably won`t change hands regardless.
14# I think the answer is the same as the last 8 times you asked it.
11# Mike Baird won’t want to put it off much longer, there are now 19 months to the next election. You’d think if he pulled a coup that he’d want at least a full year in the hot seat before the election.
Tom the first and best,
Of course the Libs hate Labor and want to hurt them/get them out. But they also hate and fear the whole idea of the Greens, so I’m not sure.
They really prefer their own pet pseudo-Independents…
17
If only NSW still had compulsory preferences because then they would have to chose and would probably chose like in Victoria. Maybe they could run a split ticket (with exhaust and Green options).
Not going to happen it Balmain, Marrickville or Heffron.
@2 & @8
[Everyone in the State must help get rid of Labor- then toss the Liberals out after one term. Then repeat and repeat and repeat, until they start getting an inkling that changes may be required…]
[Kersebleptes has it right on – anti-incumbent voting until a government gets it right.]
I see no reason to think that would work. New South Wales had six one-term governments in a row between 1917 and 1932 and I don’t see that it helped at all.
Drawing analogies between 1917-1932 and 2011 is.. not very helpful. To many people, Labor and Liberal are now pretty much the same – socially conservative, pro-developers, anti-environment except when it suits them, hopeless, factionalised. I can’t see many ideological reasons for voting Labor over Liberal or vice-versa. And there’s no reason to think that the dills in the Libs will be particularly worse than the dills we have now – so why not vote the ones out for being grossly incompetent?
Hamish Coffee right up @3 has a point that is very hard to gainsay, though- Liberal far-right religious nutjobs have it all over their Labor counterparts…
I can’t see why the Libs would direct preferences. A Green and a Labor member is much the same to them and it would dissafect some Liberal voters in other seats if they aided the Greens.
Likewise I don’t think the Greens will preference in many seats next time around because they don’t want to be seen as aiding one of the majors (Labor really).
Can we stop asking that question now, at least until 2011?
22
Getting a Green elected reduces the chance of the ALP getting a majority in a future parliament because it would give the Green an incumbency factor in a seat that is good for the Greens.
Greens will always support Labor over Liberal if in the position of choosing Government, so it makes no difference to the Liberal Party.
Much ignorance about the social conservatives in the NSW Libs here, injecting room in Kings Cross will go quickly for a start etc. etc.
24
The Greens will from time to time vote for ministers to be sacked and vote against the ALP on some measures and, if holding the balance of power, make inquires in the Assembly as independent as the ones in the Council.
Re 24: Yet I can not fathom, if in a situation where Coalition finishes above Labor but where neither side has enough for Govt that the Greens will really do that. Normally of course, even when Labor is “normally” incompetent, yes… but now?
It’s also one of those few cases where their own supporters are unlikely to kill them for it, if they actually did that, such is the state of NSW Labor.
No 25
The injecting room has been a failure. It hasn’t stopped the rate of overdoses or deaths from heroin. In fact, there is evidence that drug users are overdosing more since they know they have medical attention on call if something happens. A shameful policy.
Generic Person@28
You missed the main point of the injection room at Kingscross. It is not there principally to prevent OD, it is there to give intravenous drug injectors clean needles so they don’t share and transmit viruses like HIV and hepatitis C. It is due this policy, among others, that Australia has unusually low HIV infection rate among drug users, compared to countries like the US, where the problem is rampant.
It will be a sad and forgettable day if the injection centre is ever closed down. It will be a clear victory of ideology and personal bias over scientific and epidemiological evidence.
*due to
[Drawing analogies between 1917-1932 and 2011 is.. not very helpful. To many people, Labor and Liberal are now pretty much the same – socially conservative, pro-developers, anti-environment except when it suits them, hopeless, factionalised. I can’t see many ideological reasons for voting Labor over Liberal or vice-versa. And there’s no reason to think that the dills in the Libs will be particularly worse than the dills we have now – so why not vote the ones out for being grossly incompetent?]
I don’t know what you mean by saying the analogy isn’t helpful. It isn’t helpful to your argument because it suggests that your reasoning is flawed, but that’s the point.
(There were people back in the ’20s who thought the parties were pretty much the same, too, for whatever that’s worth.)
Arguing that you might as well vote for regular changes of government because there’s no difference between the parties is a completely different argument from arguing that you should vote for regular changes of government in order to get the parties to change their behaviour. In fact, the two arguments contradict each other. The original argument was that regular changes of government will make a difference, the new argument is that they will make no difference.
And if there’s really no difference between the parties, then ‘you might as well vote to re-elect the government’ has exactly equal validity with ‘you might as well vote to change the government’.
J-D,
Normally these would be good points.
NSW at present is a special case. It is the pits.
J-D, I did not say I vote against the incumbent because there’s no difference between the parties. I am voting against the incumbent because they are not very good, and I don’t have to justify this on ideological grounds because they both seem the same to me, so I can concentrate only on NSW Labor’s gross failures and, as they say, give the other mob a go.
A one point change is no change. These polls carry a 3% error margin.
33
It depends on which seat you are in. If you are in an ALP versus Coalition* seat then that might be just passable acceptable (not to me though) but if it is a seat that is one of the many that is not then vote for the minor party or independent.
Seats where it is close as to who comes second then vote for the minor or independent. An example of this would be Heffron where the Greens came only had to win an extra 754 votes to overtake the Libs for second place.
Generic Person @28. Citation needed.
Yes Tome the first and best, if the Greens candidate had gotten those extra votes he would have come second. Now if he had then been able to get ALL or 100% of Liberal and Independent preferences he would still have ended up with only 44% of the 2Pvote.
In reality with preference leakages or non-preferening, this would probably end up being a 8-10% margin ALP-Greens, not a mere 754 votes.
In terms of this poll, I wonder if the methodology is useful at all. Newspoll use preference flows from the last election to determine an arbitrary 2PP figure. This is meaningless in a voluntary preferencing situation. I also think that the preference flows will be different this time. I expect there will be more preferencing of Greens by Liberal voters in Balmain and Marrickville. I expect there will a lot less preferencing of the ALP by Green voters.
Why would the Greens bother with preferences in this election?
I think it rather bizarre, that some of you are talking about voing for the NSW Libs over Labor, on the grounds that you consider them to marginally less unpalatable.
We do actually have a preferential voting system in NSW (& Australia). Surely, if you consider both options to be pretty terrible, you would look to vote for some other party or independent on the day (to make both sides take notice). Naturally you can then order your preferences, between the two majors accordingly, without affecting the outcome of a two-major party contest. Why restrict your options to dweedle-dee and dweedle-dum? That makes no sense whatsoever.
A lot of peculiar analysis today and, as usual, it didn’t long before 99% of what the poll means was thrown out and we started talking about The Greens.
On preferred premier – All the figures show is that neither Nathan Rees nor Barry O’Farrell are particularly well liked. This is not really a surprise, but it’s also not very important. Labor’s woeful primary combined with the fact that The Greens are unlikely to preference them means that they’re going to struggle very hard to hold onto power.
People calling Barry O’Farrell “hapless” must not really know much about him. He’s very politically astute. This is demonstrated by the way that he has faced down one Premier and probably will beat another. As well as the fact that he’s polling on track to win government in 2011. Policy wise he seems to have some positive plans – on transport, environment, infrastructure and political donations. Of course he has a lot of policies I don’t agree with either, but I fear more about the hard religious right in NSW than I do Barry O’Farrell.
Boundary Man – the 2PP in the poll probably underestimates the Liberal vote for the reasons you mentioned. And The Greens have nothing to gain by preferencing Labor, which is why they won’t.
There are no lower house seats in The Greens sight’s were Labor preferences would come in handy. All the possible pick ups are Greens vs. Labor. In the upper house, if this poll was replicated on election day The Greens would pick up 3 seats without Labor preferences.
Oz, so this means as I think that the ALP would on these figures lose more than the 10 to the Coalition and 3 to the Greens that Imre Saluzinsky in the Oz seems to think.
Well actually OZ there were number of seats across the Lower North Shore where the Greens polled equally, or even exceeded, Labor’s vote in 2007, but given that the Liberals gained over 50% of the vote in all those seats, I suppose its a moot point.
JimmyD, do you think that the Greens might be a logical alternative in places like Ku-Ring-Gai and Davidson, rather than the ALP? Do you serioulsy think they could ever win these sorts of seats? I would have thought that in the city the Greens are unlikely to break out of those ALP seats that aren’t in any way working class seats.
[Well actually OZ there were number of seats across the Lower North Shore where the Greens polled equally, or even exceeded, Labor’s vote in 2007, but given that the Liberals gained over 50% of the vote in all those seats, I suppose its a moot point.]
I’m very aware that there are Lib vs. Green 2PP seats in NSW, but none of them are winnable for The Greens in 2011 so Labor preferences in those seats would be meaningless.
Boundary Man, I think Labor will lose more than 10 seats to the Coalition but I don’t think it will lose more than 3 seats to The Greens. I think 3 seats for The Greens is very optimistic.
Do you have a link to that article?
the article in the Oz is at
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25950443-2702,00.html
I agree with you on those losses. I do think that the ALP might do better as the anger about them seems to have disipated a bit.
OZ – I was certainly not suggesting that any seat on the North Shore will be viable for the Greens in 2011, just commenting. I think in a good ALP year, Labor would receive a higher vote than the Greens once again in most of those seats.
Boundary Man – I’m not sure about Ku-Ring-Gai or Davidson. They are both a good deal more conservative than Lower North Shore Liberal seats like North Shore, Willoughby or Lane Cove. These are the best examples of “Doctors Wives” seats, a demographic that could be good for the Greens, though their vote has never actually manifested itself. The three Lower North Shore seats I mentioned I think are the best Liberal prospects for the Greens, but not for a very long time, if ever.
I forgot to mention – the Greens also have good prospects for the future in the Far North in regional seats like Tweed, Lismore and Ballina – so who knows?
As always, the OO’s headline is misleading. Results are all within error margins. The most remarkable thing about this Poll is that nothing has changed in the 3 months since the last one.
Could this mean the electorate have tuned out?
I’d suggest both leaders need to make some inroads by the next poll or else changes can be expected. O’Farrell could face the Bill Hayden “drovers dog” dismissal and Rees clearly needs to start cutting through.
Rees has born the brunt of unpopularity throughout the GFC which appears to have affected NSW most badly. Perhaps with an improving economy, millions of infra structure dollars to be spent in the provinces and a Rudd haze effect, then things could turn around pretty quickly for the Government.
It’s 18 months till the next election and although speculating about Liberal and Greens gains is fun, I would not be counting my chickens until they are at least eggs.