Morgan: 60-40

Roy Morgan has simultaneously unloaded two sets of polling figures, as it does from time to time. The regular fortnightly face-to-face poll, conducted over the previous two weekends from a sample of 1684, has Labor’s lead nudging up to 60-40 compared with 59.5-40.5 at the previous such poll. Both major parties are down 1.5 per cent on the primary vote – Labor to 49.5 per cent, the Coalition to 34 per cent – while the Greens are up from 7.5 per cent to 9 per cent. There is also a phone poll of 695 respondents conducted mid-week, which finds a slight majority favouring “maintaining a balanced budget” over vaguely defined alternative economic objectives. The poll has Labor’s lead on voting intention at 58-42 on two-party preferred and 46.5-37 on the primary vote. The Greens are on 10.5 per cent.

Plenty happening on the electoral front, not least the finalisation of the federal redistribution for Queensland. This offers a few surprises, and may be a rare occasion where a major party’s submission has actually had an effect. Two changes in particular were broadly in line with the wishes of the Liberal National Party, which marshalled a considerable weight of media commentary to argue that the Coalition had been hard done by. As always, Antony Green has crunched the numbers: all estimated margins quoted herein are his.

• Most interestingly, the changes to Dickson that sent Peter Dutton scurrying for refuge have been partly reversed. As the LNP submission requested, the electorate has recovered the rural area along Dayboro Road and Woodford Road that it was set to lose to Longman. However, only a small concession was made to the LNP’s request that the troublesome Kallangur area be kept out of the electorate. The electoral impact is accordingly slight, clipping the notional Labor margin from 1.3 per cent to 1.0 per cent. Peter Dutton is nonetheless sufficiently encouraged that he’s indicating he might yet stand and fight – or less charitably, he’s found a pretext to get out of the corner he had backed himself into. Labor has received a corresponding boost in its marginal seat of Longman, where Jon Sullivan’s margin has been cut from 3.6 per cent at the election to 1.7 per cent, instead of the originally proposed 1.4 per cent.

• Major changes to Petrie and Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley have largely been reversed. It had been proposed to eliminate Petrie’s southern dog-leg by adding coastal areas from Shorncliffe and Deagon north to Brighton from Lilley, which would be compensated with Petrie’s southern leg of suburbs from Carseldine south to Stafford Heights. The revised boundaries have eliminated the former transfer and limited the latter to south of Bridgeman Downs. Where the original proposal gave Labor equally comfortable margins in both, the revision gives Wayne Swan 8.8 per cent while reducing Yvette D’Ath to an uncomfortable 4.2 per cent. Retaining Shorncliffe, Deagon and Brighton in Lilley had been advocated in the LNP submission. Almost-local observer Possum concurs, saying the revised boundaries better serve local communities of interest.

• South of Brisbane and inland of the Gold Coast, changes have been made to the boundary between Forde and the new electorate of Wright, with a view to consolidating the rural identity of the latter. Forde gains suburban Boronia Heights and loses an area of hinterland further south, extending from suburban Logan Village to rural Jimboomba. Labor’s margin in Forde has increased from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent, and the Coalition’s in Wright is up from 3.8 per cent to 4.8 per cent.

• Little remains of a proposed northward shift of the boundary between Kennedy and Leichhardt from the Mitchell River to the limits of Tablelands Regional council. Kennedy will now only gain an area around Mount Molloy, 150 kilometres north-west of Cairns. Its boundary with Dawson has also been tidied through the expansion of a transfer from Dawson south of Townsville, aligning it with the Burdekin River. None of the three seats’ margins has changed.

• Moreton gains a park and golf course from Oxley in the west and loses part of Underwood to Rankin in the south-east, with negligible impact on their margins.

• Maranoa has gained the area around Wandoan from Flynn, making the boundary conform with Western Downs Regional Council. This boosts Labor’s margin in Flynn from 2.0 per cent to 2.3 per cent, compared with 0.2 per cent at the election.

• Three minor adjustments have been made to the boundary between the safe Liberal Sunshine Coast seats of Fisher and Fairfax, allowing the entirety of Montville to remain in Fisher.

• Ryan has taken a sliver of inner city Toowong from Brisbane.

Other news:

• The Financial Review’s Mark Skulley reported on Wednesday that the federal government was moving quickly to get its electoral reform package into shape. Labor is said to be offering a deal: if the Liberals drop their opposition to slashing the threshold for public disclosure of donations (which the Coalition and Steve Fielding voted down in March), the government will include union affiliation fees in a ban on donations from corporations, third parties and associated entities. Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald says the New South Wales branch of the ALP alone receives $1.3 million in revenue a year from the fees, which unions must pay to send delegates to party conferences. According to Skulley, many union leaders fear a Rudd plot to “Blairise” the party by weakening union ties, with Coorey naming the ACTU and Victorian unions as “most hostile”. It is further reported that the parties propose to cover the foregone revenue by hiking the rate of public funding. VexNews “understands” that an increase from $2.24 per vote to $10 is on the cards, potentially increasing the total payout from $49 million to $200 million. The site says Westpac currently has a formal claim over Labor’s public funding payout after the next election, as the party is currently $8 million in debt. The Liberals are said to be keen because they’re having understandable trouble raising funds at the moment. A further amendment proposes to restrict political advertising by third parties. As well as being stimulating politically, some of these moves might be difficult constitutionally.

• A proposed referendum on reform to the South Australian Legislative Council has been voted down in said chamber. The referendum would have been an all-or-nothing vote to change terms from a staggered eight years to an unstaggered four, reduce its membership from 22 to 16, allow a deliberative rather than a casting vote for the President and establish a double dissolution mechanism to resolve deadlocks. Another bill amending the Electoral Act has been passed, although it will not take effect until after the March election. A number of its measures bring the state act into line with the Commonwealth Electoral Act: party names like “Liberals for Forests” have been banned, provisions have been made for enrolment of homeless voters, and MPs will be able to access constituents’ dates of birth on the electoral roll (brace yourselves for presumptuous birthday greetings in the mail). The number of members required of a registered party has been increased from 150 to 200: if you’re wondering why they bothered, the idea was to hike it to 500 to make life difficult for the putative Save the Royal Adelaide Hospital party, but the government agreed to a half-measure that wouldn’t threaten the Nationals. Misleading advertising has also been introduced as grounds for declaring a result void if on the balance of probabilities it affected the result. The Council voted down attempts to ban “corflute” advertising on road sides and overturn the state’s unique requirement that how-to-vote cards be displayed in each polling compartment.

• Deborah Morris of the Hastings Leader reports Helen Constas, chief executive of the Peninsula Community Legal Centre, has been preselected as Labor’s candidate for the south-eastern Melbourne federal seat of Dunkley, where Liberal member Bruce Billson’s margin was cut from 9.3 per cent to 4.0 per cent at the 2007 election. Constas was said to have had “a convincing win in the local ballot”. UPDATE: Andrew Crook of Crikey details Constas’s preselection as a win for the left born of disunity between the Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy forces of the Right; Right faction sources respond at VexNews.

• The ABC reports that Nationals members in the state electorate of Dubbo have voted not to abandon their preselection privileges by being the guinea pig in the state party’s proposed open primary experiment. There is reportedly a more welcoming mood in Port Macquarie, which like Dubbo is a former Nationals seat that has now had consecutive independent members.

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.

791 comments on “Morgan: 60-40”

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  1. Anyone who sees the full stop on the first sentence and the question mark on the second in post 599 needs their eyes checked.

  2. 600

    Well the question is really has he been officially appointed yet? Does an appointment for a government job that has not started yet constitute an office of profit or trust under the crown?

  3. Tom – I think he Nelson takes up the appointment in Feb/March next year.

    He said he would be working for the new bloke in Bradfield for the election and he wouldn’t be able to do that if his appointment had officially started.

  7. Antony Green/Socrates (back at 502-509)

    [Sorry for being a stickler Socrates, but us main stream media people would get our arses shot for the factual errors in comment 502]

    I was watching the ABC News coverage of the planning decision on Branxton. I have to say that it alas had about zero of the nuance and subtlety that Antony outlined…IMHO, it was much closer in both content and tone to Socrates’ description at 502; they even managed to get Graham Richardson into the segment. I was half expecting Minister Keneally to appear in the next visual in a very fetching orange jump-suit being frog-marched by the constabulary down to Mulawa.

    No doubt the segment will be on the internet before too long, so with respect Antony, your collegues do not appear to have the appropriate standards that you demonstrate . I doubt any posteriors being shot 😀

  8. GG

    Yes, eg this comment on the sampling deficiencies;
    [..It seems you only ask Westies who wouldn’t know a decent charming man if he slapped them in the face with a used profylactic.]

    …and the erudite GG points the spotlight at the elephant in the room: Turnbull hasn’t yet had the simple, manly, basic decency to apologise to either Rudd or Swan about his Utegate performance. He is much diminished in the eyes of all as a result of this simple failure.

  11. [Macfarlane on 7:30 Report sounds pretty sure a deal will be done.]
    Well I hope not. If the Government agrees to the coalition amendments then we may as well not bother having an ETS.

  12. After watching another Rudd minister on the 7.30 talk spin i had to switch the television off.
    Rudd is useless cannot allow eighty asylum seekers into our waters and have an opportunity to become citizens is simply pathetic.
    And then their is Wong what a useless pathetic minister she is, say no more. This government is all about spin and nothing else.

  13. The ETS means nothing at present anyway, Treasury modelling says emissions will not be reduced until 2033. What a dud of a policy it is.

  14. I notice in the Myer prospectus that their proposed head of human resources is a product of the old worker-bashing WMC and a director of the Institute of Public Affairs.

    That’s all I need to read to know that Myer will never achieve its full potential and will be a dud investment.

    Mrs Trubbell has also today cancelled her Myer One card.

  19. [The ETS means nothing at present anyway, Treasury modelling says emissions will not be reduced until 2033. What a dud of a policy it is.]

    I’ve missed your insightful analysis, marky
    😉

  20. Did not want to say anything but tonight this government has gone simply crazy, it is losing the plot.
    Who is running this government, must be the rednecks and the Murdoch press….

  21. [Who is running this government, must be the rednecks and the Murdoch press….]
    Yeah that’s exactly right. That’s why Rudd has gone out of his way to attack The Australian.

  23. One of the reasons i dissappeared is because this site has bloggers who work for the government.
    They do not want to admit it, but their aim is to feed government information and blog government propaganda.

  26. Oil is still leaking in the Timor Sea. Three attempts to stop it, all failed.

    But Colin Barnett is confident it can be fixed. The leak, that is, not so much the eight+ weeks worth of spillage.

    [“It is only fortunate that it is so far out to sea that it is not impacting directly on the West Australian coast line.”]

    It’s certainly fortunate that it’s a bit difficult to get TV cameras out there.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/19/2718295.htm

  28. [One of the reasons i dissappeared is because this site has bloggers who work for the government.
    They do not want to admit it, but their aim is to feed government information and blog government propaganda.]

    I’ve heard some doozies in my time about so called ALP hacks, but this takes the cake for sheer lunacy – he is definately channeling his namesake post resignation.

  31. Rewi, we’ll have to hope that no boats carrying refugees stray over the oil slick. Someone might light up a smoke and then there’d be hell to pay from the Opposition for both a heartless and totally slack boarder protection policy and a totally slack and hopeless environment protection policy.

  33. Gee whiz must have woken them all up… They have been having a meaningless, crappy conversation for months and now their all back in action like a bunch of vultures at a carcass…. It is a feeding frenzy…

  36. As far as I know, Adam is the only person here who actually works for the Government and he is hardly “the brainwashed, uneducated type”. It doesn’t really matter if someone works for the Govt anyway; if they spin BS, we should be able to detect it and expose it.

  38. And welcome back, marky marky. I look forward to your thoughtful and educated contributions to the ongoing debate on topics of concern to us all. And no, on this occasion, I’m not being snarky, tho’ if you approach us with snark, what do you expect?

  39. Rewi, seriously, do you know how far off Timor the slick is laying? Bloddy original means of sharing the resource, nnnnnngh. (This is barely suppressed expletive deleted, so you’ll know for next time)

  42. Did hear that, Rewi, and wondered about it, from the point of view that we still know so little about how this part of the world actually works, as far as I can make out.

  44. [Apparently it’s a Sunni group with ‘links to Al Qaida’]
    And also done with the connivance of the Great Satan and it’s Anglo sidekick, according to reliable Iranian government sources.

    Do they really think their own populace believe this stuff?

  46. [One of the reasons i dissappeared is because this site has bloggers who work for the government.]

    What as? Secret Service Agents for ASIO?

    I know of at least “one” who has or is working as a Ministerial staffer. Would that be sufficient to be classed as “bloggers who work for the government”???

    Could be a good time to “disappeared” again before they come to get you!!! 🙂

  47. Laocoon, IMHO, a blog post that describes a minister as acting unlawfully and a news report that stated she got her decision wrong are different in tone and content.

  48. Whoopie do…

    Scorpio you are so correct, anyone different is a marked man or markyed man…
    Be careful of those who we cannot brainwash or capture or who have original thoughts…
    Always best to invite Cate Blanchett and other actors and celebrities to Canberra to come up with some
    ideas… They have original thoughts…

  49. For anyone who missed it earlier, Senator Barnaby Joyce has endorsed Bill Clinton and Al Gore to take over as the leaders of the coalition:

  50. Antony

    The SMH article said that Kenneally acted unlawfully. I must be missing something.

    [THE state’s biggest housing project has collapsed after the Planning Minister, Kristina Keneally, admitted she acted unlawfully in approving the 7200-home Hunter Valley proposal.]

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